Outsourcery wins first G-Cloud contract, supplies NHS trust

Cloud services provider Outsourcery has won its first G-Cloud contract, a unified communications deal with Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.

Outsourcery will deliver the Microsoft Lync software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution to the trust, which will be delivered from Outsourcery’s O-Cloud PGA OFFICIAL Internet Platform.

The trust provides specialist mental health and community health services and employs over 4,000 staff across 100 hundred sites. This is the first time the trust has procured services using the G-Cloud procurement framework.

The contract coincides with the launch of the UK government’s new Contracts Finder portal, unveiled by cabinet office minister Francis Maude, the prime minister’s enterprise adviser Lord Young, and Outsourcery’s Co-CEO Piers Linney. New legislation has also just come into force to reduce cash flow risks for businesses supplying the public sector and to further simplify procurement.

Commenting on the trust deal, Linney said: “The G-Cloud framework provides significant benefits to all public sector organisations, whether at a national or local level by enabling them to engage with innovative small and medium sized enterprises such as Outsourcery, that may not be on existing procurement frameworks.”

He said: “With the launch of the revamped Contracts Finder portal, public sector opportunities will become less complicated and costly to bid for, making deals such as ours with Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust more common. The new Contracts Finder portal is a huge opportunity for SMEs to gain visibility across a wealth of public sector opportunities.”

Mark Davison, director of IM&T at Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Using the G-Cloud gave us access to a much broader range of suppliers that we would not have considered had we followed previous procurement approaches outside the framework. Importantly, this meant receiving tenders from a range of smaller providers who were able to be more competitive on price and flexible in the service they offered.”

He added: “The new highly resilient Microsoft Lync service will be installed across two data centres for instant messaging, presence and audio/video conferencing, to enable collaboration across the trust, to increase productivity and to reduce costs.”