The Government has opened up a tender to provide its G-Cloud computing framework, with a budget of 60 million to implement it.
The tender, published online late yesterday, says it is seeking a "Pan Government Collaborative Framework Agreement for use by UK public sector bodies" to provide cloud computing to all areas of Government, from central departments to the NHS.
A 3pm deadline on 30 November 2011 to place bids has been set and the framework has been split into four "lots," meaning vendors can submit tenders to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and "specialist cloud services" separately.
Despite much of the Government's ICT Strategy being based on cloud computing technologies, the contract on offer is only for six months.
Although the Cabinet Office today published the Strategic Implementation Plan (SIP) to outline its timetable of putting March's ICT Strategy in place, it has delayed the sub-strategy document on cloud computing by another week, promising it will be published before the end of October.
To be in with a chance, companies must submit their tenders online using the Government Procurement Service eSourcing portal.
The tender finalises the re-birth of the term G-Cloud, which disappeared from the radar for a few months following the launch of the ICT Strategy.
Back in June, IT Pro, was told by the managing director of HP in the UK that G-Cloud plans had been "canned."
Although the Cabinet Office claimed the Government was still interested in cloud computing, the term "G-Cloud" was not used, raising many questions around the future of the project.
However, last month, Martin Bellamy, director of change and ICT at the Ministry of Justice, said the project was "alive and kicking," promising the strategy document would put all doubts to rest.
