I’m in with the in G-Cloud, but let’s not do lunch OK?

Dag Engels,
Are you in with the “In” Cloud?
Do you go where the “In” Cloud goes?
Do you know what the “In” Cloud knows?

Well, UK Cabinet Minister, Frankie “Says Relax” Maude says he does and apparently this spells GOOD NEWS for the channel and SMEs!

According to Maude, who hates the word “portal” and wants it banned- but likes the word “Cloud Store,” (erm)….it’s never been so good for resellers to get into the UK public sector!

“A chicken in every pot and a cloud over every town hall!” will probably be his mantra over the summer as he tries to save his political career from his inflammatory Forecourt Fiasco over Easter.

And he’s probably still under the cosh from boss, DC (or Top Cat as he is known in Whitehall). The Prime Minister, knows, like Blair before him, that a good solid bit of High Tech evangelism is a great tactic to win back the technocrats of the new Left who talk about health and education behind the glow of a Mac Air and who want to BYOD into Croydon Council.

And Maude is Top Cat’s man to come up with some Technological Tory Blue Sky thinking to take the electorate’s mind off the hammering they and their allies, Zee Liberals, got at the UK ballot box last week.

Like Maude’s brilliant petrol-think-tank thinking, it all seems perfect on paper: If we save billions of previously wasted tax-payer money by using the cloud instead of traditional ICT projects, this money can be diverted to “Frontline Services.”

“BOOM”. Ed Broadyband won’t have an answer to that!

And by using the cloud to level the playing field for smaller, innovative companies such as the channel to enter the realm of the public sector, it will no longer the realm of the public school chum.

“TAKE THAT”, Tory Sleeze hunters! The UK coalition is eradicating cronyism and the old school tie! He must be thinking, whilst hoping that a chum of Boris will come good for a ticket to the Olympic women’s beach volley because his firm was using a cloud based programme to monitor how many Latvian pickpockets have illegally bought tickets.

But Bitterballen! Is what I say!

The reality will probably be the same for Cloud as it ever was for traditional ICT projects and favour the bigger players because of the complexities that it will throw up and the capacity to deal with these large issues.

Already the US government, who have had a cloud-first mantra for some time is already getting its knickers in a twist over big data as the oversimplification of cloud begins to unravel into traditional IT complexities and interdependencies.

It will also for the short term at least still be an inevitable and impenetrable tendering and procurement process written in High Dutch, by goblins at Gringotts and co-authored by government bureaucrats that have no idea about technology but are sheisse-heisse at process.

The tripartite service contacts alone will need more lawyers than OJ Simpson to wade through and HM Treasury will hate things like consumptive billing! It certainly won’t be an overnight thing and will need to be bulletproof in terms of security, availability and the rest.

Please tell me I am wrong! I want to get into those ring fenced budgets as much as anyone and I know a lot of my Distie colleagues are currently growing public sector divisions within their organisations and growing public sector business hand over fist.

But is it really as a level playing field as it is being suggested and how are the channel players that are doing well in the Public Sector doing it?

For a long time, I thought my distributor colleagues they were using some of the legendary channel hospitality to curry favour with your public sector servants.

But under the new Bribery Act, some of the old school tactics of “strippers on motorbikes”, “Golf days” and “prestige sporting events” are now strictly verboten (unless monitoring Latvian pickpockets).

I have tried to invite public sector people to the WMD Golf day, but have had polite refusals. I’ll just have to invite them to the Channel Biz Awards in November or adopt this cunning workaround to the Bribery Act I heard from a colleague.

It’s a sure-fire winner!

1. Invite your guests to a premium sporting event and explain you have sent the tickets to a nearby restaurant to the venue you know will be closed on the day by the Police to prevent crowd disorder.

2. Turn up at the restaurant and bash on the windows like Dustin Hoffman in the Graduate: “Oh God, please no..etc”

3. If it is somewhere like Wembley and your guests are from the north of the UK they will not want to get back on a three hour train they had to buy for themselves and will be hungry.

4. To make good, offer to buy lunch at another restaurant.

5. Then use Google maps (and the cloud) to find the closest pub with Sky Sports for a Pie and a Pint.

6. They get to see the event, you get to speak to them and the UK public servant can go home with a clear conscious!

Gauw tot ziens