Government departments are beginning to get on-board with the G-Cloud, as the first customer confirms its purchase from the CloudStore.
The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) told IT Pro's sister title Cloud Pro it has purchased Agile education services from the CloudStore, to deliver its Future Coastguard Programme. This is one of three Agile pilot programmes/projects in the Department for Transport to help reduce waste and project failiure in IT when moving to a new system.
"Our experience of the CloudStore catalogue was that it was simple and fast," James Findlay, Future Coastguard programme director at the MCA, told Cloud Pro.
"With support from the Cabinet Office G-Cloud team and MCA procurement team, we were able to identify potential service suppliers and award contract in less than 24 hours, which in terms of our aim for doing things differently without the need for lengthy and costly competitions for commodity services, I can definitely say that the CloudStore delivered for us.
We are really happy to have our first G-Cloud customer through the door and for the process to have run so smoothly.
Chris Chant, head of the G-Cloud project in Whitehall, told Cloud Pro he was very pleased with the way the first sale had gone for the CloudStore.
"We are really happy to have our first G-Cloud customer through the door and for the process to have run so smoothly," he said.
"This is the key to the CloudStore; a lot more choice for Government departments with a fast deployment time to get going with the service straight away. Here's to many more customers following the MCA's example."
Version one of the CloudStore officially launched in February with 257 companies offering 1,700 applications to public bodies.
Hosted on Microsoft's Azure platform, the store was hit with an outage last week thanks to a leap year bug' taking down the whole service.
However, the second version due out later in the year is set to be built on an open source platform so may circumvent any of Microsoft's issues at that time.
