It was such a surprise that everyone can remember where they were the day that
Skyscape Cloud Services Ltd won the contract to host GOV.UK.
Skyscape was so young then that the company hadn't even submitted its first set of accounts to Companies House. One man alone owned all the shares in the company. There was plenty of competition from long-established cloud services companies with measurable track records. How did Skyscape beat them?
How did Skyscape go on to win contracts with the MOD? And
HMRC? And the Home Office?
How did they qualify for
pan-government accreditation?
Last month Skyscape surprised the world again with its
open letter to the Government Digital Service and the Government Procurement Service. G-Cloud sales are rising "exponentially", they said, but that's not fast enough for Skyscape. G-Cloud is transforming government IT, they said, but again, not enough. Were they really saying that G-Cloud
isn't working? And
won't work, as currently designed?
There is a mystery exercising some of us about that open letter of Skyscape's. How did they get
Bird & Bird to sign it?
Bird and Bird are solicitors. Red hot, no doubt, at drafting agreements, what are they doing signing a public complaint about operational matters drafted by a little splinter group of malcontents and addressed to what must be Bird and Bird's (prospective) clients?
While we were all pondering that, Skyscape slipped in yet another surprise. They submitted their 2013 statutory accounts to Companies House. 19 pages of surprises. They need to be rationed. You can have one now, just to be going on with.
Skyscape have used the
Business review and future developments section of the
Directors' report to do a hard sell. Among other things, the directors say:
| With a current G-Cloud market share of circa 50%, Skyscape is the leading supplier of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on the UK government's G-Cloud framework and delivers services directly to an increasing range of government departments including ... |
50%?
A company that barely existed a year ago has been given 50% of G-Cloud business?
Is that the sign of a market operating efficiently?
What's the point of any other suppliers trying to sell through G-Cloud?
Those and many other questions would need to be answered if the 50% claim was accurate but, as it happens, it isn't.
Let's assume that a "current G-Cloud market share" is a share as at 23 December 2013 when Skyscape's accounts were signed. G-Cloud have published their
sales figures to the end of November 2013 and Skyscape account for £1.3 million out of a total of £77.8 million. 1.7% of the G-Cloud market. Not 50%.
As for being the "leading supplier" of IaaS, according to the G-Cloud sales figures again, Skyscape do precisely no IaaS business, they make their money out of hosting, compute and storage. G-Cloud's IaaS business, such as it is, goes mainly to Intechnology plc.
N Please see update below, 23 February 2014.What will Skyscape come up with to entertain us next?
----------
Updated 23 February 2014N Alan Mather has kindly corrected a DMossEsq mistake here.
Search through the November 2013 sales figures for G-Cloud, looking for occurrences of "IaaS", and you find 15 of them as follows:
Lot | Supplier | Product / Service Description | Total Charge £(Ex VAT) |
4 | Actica Consulting Ltd | IaaS procurement | 11,900.00 |
4 | Actica Consulting Ltd | IaaS procurement | 12,275.00 |
4 | Actica Consulting Ltd | IaaS contract set-up support | 11,175.00 |
1 | INTECHNOLOGY PLC | IaaS | 9,500.00 |
1 | INTECHNOLOGY PLC | IaaS | 9,300.00 |
1 | INTECHNOLOGY PLC | IaaS | 9,300.00 |
1 | INTECHNOLOGY PLC | IaaS | 9,500.00 |
1 | INTECHNOLOGY PLC | IaaS | 52,618.00 |
1 | INTECHNOLOGY PLC | IaaS | 49,560.00 |
1 | INTECHNOLOGY PLC | IaaS | 9,500.00 |
1 | INTECHNOLOGY PLC | IaaS | 9,500.00 |
1 | INTECHNOLOGY PLC | IaaS | 9,500.00 |
1 | INTECHNOLOGY PLC | IaaS | 9,500.00 |
1 | INTECHNOLOGY PLC | IaaS | 9,500.00 |
1 | SPECIALIST COMPUTER CENTRE | GCLOUD IAAS VPN TERMINATION | 4,120.00 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 226,748.00 |
No sign of Skyscape in the list, and thus the "Skyscape do precisely no IaaS business" comment above.
But that's not how you do it. The G-Cloud framework is divided into four Lots – 1, 2, 3 and 4 – and the whole of Lot 1 is classed as IaaS, see
G-Cloud ‘Simple’ Procurement Instructions:
- Lot 1 - Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Lot 2 - Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Lot 3 - Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Lot 4 - Specialist Cloud Services
On that basis, Skyscape had
38.86% (£1,299,765.53) of G-Cloud's IaaS business (£3,344,877.25) which, in some circles, could be described as "circa 50%", as long as you don't accidentally give the impression that you have
50% of the total market (£77.8 million) when, in fact, you only have
1.7%:
| With a current G-Cloud market share of circa 50%, Skyscape is the leading supplier of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on the UK government's G-Cloud framework and delivers services directly to an increasing range of government departments including ... |
Updated 18.8.17Just to keep
DMossEsq's millions of readers bang up to date, it should be noted that Skyscape changed its name a year ago to UKCloud, please see
Skyscape Cloud Services relaunches as UKCloud.
Why did they change their name?
ElReg suggest that
Skyscape rebrands to UKCloud following legal challenge by Sky.
Computer Weekly magazine seem to agree, please see
The Sky's the limit: Why UK Cloud has become the new name for Skyscape Cloud Services.
Diginomica magazine ditto,
David v Goliath – Skyscape rebrands as UKCloud after taking Sky to court.
ElReg et al may be partially right but "UKCloud" is undeniably a more appropriate name than "Skyscape". UKCloud's strategist Bill Mew argued in January this year that organisations including government departments are wrong to trust the big US cloud suppliers. In
Only one cheer for the government’s public cloud endorsement he singled out Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure (Microsoft) in particular. It would be wrong to trust them with your data.
He says you'd be safer using UKCloud, who respect data sovereignty.
So now it's not just UKCloud v. Rupert Murdoch's Sky but also UKCloud v. Amazon and UKCloud v. Microsoft ...
... and UKCloud v. GDS, the Government Digital Service – Mr Mew is not impressed with GDS's failure to argue in favour of UK data sovereignty.
DMossEsq agrees. GDS have consistently shown
a complete lack of interest in the matter.
"... it was this largely inaccurate perception that public cloud is less secure than private cloud that was the main factor holding back cloud adoption. GDS’s recent very clear rebuttal of this central perception and its clear endorsement of public cloud is therefore very welcome", says Mr Mew. Cloud security
is a problem and GDS saying it
isn't won't comfort anyone.
Cloud security is a problem. And so is data sovereignty in the cloud. They always were and they still are. The case for cloud remains ...
insubstantial.
