G-Cloud, the UK government’s digital marketplace could accept business from other European governments, boosting the prospects of G-Cloud providers, and Europe’s public sector cloud, according to a government advisor.

A change to the wording of the G-Cloud tender documents would make the marketplace compliant with procurement regulations in all 28 European Union member states, according to Stephen Allott, who was Crown Representative for SMEs at the Cabinet Office until August 2015, and has since been promoting the G-Cloud and its digital marketplace.

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– Thinkstock / _marqs

Billions in growth?

“If David Cameron and his staff really look at the numbers, the Prime Minister could confidently walk to a podium and announce that, with the expansion of the G-Cloud Digital Marketplace to all EU28 Member States, the United Kingdom has single-handedly delivered an additional 7% GDP growth to the EU which translates to over trillion pounds sterling by 2025,” said Allott, in a blog on LinkedIn, published by Advice Cloud. 

Allott says that cloud computing boost the economy generally, quoting IDC figures that claim cloud computing could add a cumulative total of €449bn to the EU28 GDP between 2015 and 2020. 

He also quotes an in-house claim from the Government Digital Service (GDS) Digital Marketplace, that G-Cloud services are 20 percent cheaper than those on the wider market. 

The UK has a £17 billion public sector IT market, but the EU as a whole spends something like £100 billion (€127bn, $141bn) on public sector IT, says Allott, and much of this market would be available to suppliers in the G-Cloud.