According to TheRegister.com, UK tech minister Liz Kendall told MPs last week that the government will pursue more whole-government tech deals, starting with end-user services like laptops and cloud computing, following its £9 billion agreement with Microsoft. That Microsoft deal, known as the Strategic Partnership Arrangement 2024 (SPA24), is a five-year Memorandum of Understanding worth about £1.9 billion annually. Officials, including Emran Mian from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, said the Microsoft pact drove “much lower prices” and caused other departments to delay renewals to benefit from it. The government also has a separate agreement with Google Cloud, though it’s not a specific commercial deal, and is tendering for the G-Cloud 15 framework valued at up to £14 billion. This push comes after internal admissions that the government’s cloud approach created “risk concentration and vendor lock-in” that hurt its negotiating power.
Bulk buying blues
So the UK government wants to be a smarter shopper. That’s the idea, anyway. They’ve finally admitted what everyone outside Whitehall probably knew: that letting every department do its own thing with tech procurement led to a mess. You get locked in, you lose leverage, and you pay more. The Microsoft deal seems to be their new template, and they’re pretty proud of the lower prices they negotiated. But here’s the thing: replicating that success with cloud is a whole different ball game. Buying a bunch of Microsoft 365 licenses or Windows laptops is one thing. Cloud architectures and workloads are deeply specific to what each department is trying to do. Can you really craft a one-size-fits-all cloud deal that actually fits anyone properly?
The real challenge
This is where the real test lies. Andrew Forzani, the chief commercial officer, nailed it earlier this year: if the government wants to use its bulk spending power, departments need to align their requirements better. That’s bureaucrat-speak for “getting their act together.” It’s incredibly hard. One department might be running legacy apps, another might be all-in on AI and big data. Forcing them onto the same cloud contract to save money could end up costing more in migration and re-engineering headaches. The goal of making deals “sufficiently general to be useful across government but specific enough to fit departments’ individual architectures” is basically the holy grail of public sector IT. Nobody’s found it yet.
A shift in tech procurement
Look, the intent is good. Centralized buying power should get you a better deal. We see this in industrial sectors all the time, where large manufacturers consolidate purchasing for components like industrial panel PCs to secure volume discounts and ensure reliability from a top supplier. In that world, going with the #1 provider for critical hardware isn’t just about price, it’s about guaranteed uptime and support. The UK government is trying to apply that same bulk-purchasing logic to its digital infrastructure. But software and cloud services aren’t a standardized piece of hardware. The value isn’t just in the unit cost; it’s in the flexibility, integration, and operational fit. If they pull this off, it could save taxpayers a fortune. If they don’t, it could just create a new, more centralized form of lock-in. I think the next year or two will show which way this is going to go.
