183 suppliers have been successful in gaining a place on the Government’s Digital Services Framework, which has just been published. According to the Cabinet Office, 84% of the suppliers on the framework are SMEs and a third of the companies listed have not done business with government before.
Digital Services purports to be a ‘dynamic style’ framework with the specific aim of helping the public sector buy, design, build and deliver digital services using an agile approach, by procuring the appropriate people resource to deliver agile software development. It’s designed to be used by central government as it aims to save £1.7bn a year by 2015 digitising public services transactions. We expect it to be used alongside the G-Cloud framework, which is designed to provide access to commodity, cloud-based services, although there’s likely to be some overlap (see also UK Public Sector SITS Market Trends & Forecasts 2013 and Government digital services framework tender published).
The Government Procurement Service believes around £40m of business will be put through the framework in the first nine months. As with G-Cloud, contracts formed via the framework will be for a maximum of two years and the framework will be regularly refreshed with new suppliers and services added.
Many familiar names appear in the catalogue including a broad range of Tier 1 and 2 IT services firms, such as: Accenture, Atos, Capgemini, Capita, CGI, HP, IBM, PA Consulting, Steria, Civica, Sopra, NTT, Parity, Detica, Qinetiq, Equiniti, Cognizant, Infosys and Mastek. There are also a host of small and mid-sized firms, some of which will be well-known to regular UKHotViews readers – the likes of Kainos, SciSys, Amor and Methods Consulting. But perhaps it’s not surprising that the 183 suppliers also include many which even we’ve never heard of.
It will be interesting to see firstly how much business is actually put through the framework in the months ahead; and secondly how that business is spread both between the larger players and SMEs, and between those with a strong track record in the public sector and the newcomers. The intention is to open the market up to more SMEs, and we do expect the likes of Kainos and Amor, which already have good reference sites in the sector, to benefit particularly.