Whitehall, an apology – they haven't gone mad, they're just lying

A P O L O G Y

In common with precisely no other media outlets DMossEsq yesterday accused Whitehall of having gone mad.

Apologies.

Readers will be relieved to know that far from going bonkers, Whitehall are simply guilty of economy with the actualité, embroidering, gilding the lily, trying it on, stretching things a bit, terminological inexactitude and lying.

So nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to worry about after all.

[Skyscape has subsequently changed its name to UKCloud: "London – August 1, 2016 – Skyscape Cloud Services Limited, the easy to adopt, easy to use and easy to leave assured cloud services company, has today renamed and relaunched as UKCloud Ltd (www.ukcloud.com), to reinforce the company’s exclusive focus on supporting the UK public sector in the digital transformation of services".]

Fact: GDS, the Government Digital Service, have retained Skyscape to host GOV.UK, the central government website. That's what it says on their blog.

Fact: Skyscape is a £100 £1,000 company. That's what it says on the Companies House website.

Fact: The G-Cloud team claimed that this purchase of website hosting services from Skyscape is an example of government using small and medium-sized enterprises. That's what it says on the G-Cloud blog:

The purchase also shows that government is ready to embrace low cost utility cloud services and is  buying from SME’s

In the ordinary course of events that would be unbusinesslike and irresponsible. And mad.

What the entire journalistic team at DMossEsq missed, the editors and the in-house libel lawyer as well, is that Skyscape is no ordinary £100 £1,000 company.

Take a look at their website. Skyscape describe themselves as an alliance, the "Skyscape Cloud Alliance", what we might normally call a "joint venture", between five companies as shown in the table below:

Skyscape Cloud Alliance
(£1 = $1.60)	Revenue ($)	Revenue (£)	Staff	Data source
QinetiQ		1,469,600,000	10,180	PDF
VMware	3,767,096,000	2,354,435,000	11,000	PDF
Cisco	43,218,000,000	27,011,250,000	25,898	PDF
EMC²	20,007,600,000	12,504,750,000	53,600	PDF
ARK Continuity		2,015,696	10	Companies House, annual report and accounts to 30 April 2011
		43,342,050,696	100,688

What the G-Cloud team would have us believe is that this organisation holding itself out as being backed by over 100,000 staff and £43 billion of turnover is an SME.

If Whitehall believe that, they're fooling themselves. That's up to them, but they can hardly expect us the public to believe it.