FOCUS UK PUBLIC SECTOR
Issue 16, June/July
THE END OF SUPPLIER LOCK IN
Interview: UK Government Deputy CIO Bill McCluggage guides us through the changing data center landscape now driven by cost savings and cloud delivery. The government gravy train is no more. As data centers are closed, suppliers must adapt to the cloud delivery model, as Ambrose McNevin finds out
T
he UK government doesn’t really care how many data centers it operates. Its concerns lie in how much it costs to operate its
data center estate. With that in mind it has appointed Crown Representatives. It is their job to ensure that big companies selling into government departments view it as a single customer, to eradicate duplication and improve efficiency.
It was appropriate, therefore, that when FOCUS met with Bill McCluggage, Deputy Government CIO of the UK Government and Director of ICT Strategy and Planning, we met at the offices of HM Treasury in Whitehall. From the vantage of a meeting room in a tower overlooking St James Park, the view took in The Palace of Westminster, HM Treasury, and in the not-far distance, Buckingham Palace.
With several great offices of state in view and the Crown and the Executive on the visible horizon we set about discussing the government’s latest approach to managing its data center and ICT estate – how it plans to build a government cloud. And ultimately how it manages its suppliers.
“We’re moving on from counting data centers and reducing the number of them. We’re looking at a 35% reduction in the cost of data centers over the next five years,” McCluggage says.
It is clear that huge change, catalyzed by several factors including an administration change, a new project moratorium, a budget squeeze and a cloud-driven rethink to delivery mechanisms, has led to a complete re-evaluation of infrastructure assets, internal priorities and supplier relationships.
The UK Central Government is a federated organization with a large number of very large departments and thousands of projects. Private business could have much to learn from its approach to rationalization in a period of budgetary constraint delivered in
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www.datacenterdynamics.com
the context of disruptive cloud technology which is promising significant cost savings, performance improvements, transparency and flexibility.
“The interesting thing in the UK is that we have data centers supplied to central government from systems integrators (SIs). So a large proportion of our service supply is bought in. Our suppliers were providing us with under utilized assets delivering overcapacity. That may be logical in terms of surge, for example HMRC’s (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) tax collection cycle is very spikey. So all of the scheduling and procuring and capacity management was done on maximum requirements and intended throughput over the next X number of years,” McCluggage says.
UK Government Deputy CIO Bill McCluggage
“A data center is not a quick turnaround item. It is bought as a single activity for a period of 10 years and above.”
THE STARTING POINT
“In 2010 we had a new administration – we were going through an inflection point from slight budget growth into an agenda environment where we had to radically save money. That generated six priority measures – that led to the Chancellor’s speech – and we set out the moratorium and project reviews in May last year.”
Famously the Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude called in each of the major IT suppliers to government for a review – according to one source from within a supplier he effectively demanded a refund on existing contracts if the supplier wished to be considered for any future projects. For many suppliers this meant a wake up call (see page 30 for a list of suppliers)
“Back in 2009 we were still towards the latter end of a growth cycle and still on the move towards digital services and
automation. We were not unusual
other than having a lower utilization figure than we would have expected
compared with others,” McCluggage says.
He says this was not universal but that because of its make up as a large federated organization, as with any organization with such a profile when it is examined closely, there is bound to be overcapacity. “At that time there was the maturing cycle of virtualization – we already had HP consolidate its service capacity in terms of global data centers – we were seeing Fujitsu, Atos Origin, IBM and BT (among the big 13 SIs selling into government) starting to roll out virtualized environments.”
The government is actually well placed to drive a data center consolidation program in tandem with the move to cloud, McCluggage says. Approximately 60-70% of UK government IT is already outsourced.
LOCK IN
“We’ve moved out of owning infrastructure to buying it from a systems integrator – we are now more involved in the quality of the service, cost and availability. These are the fundamental characteristics of a cloud-based service model. The major issue is that we’re in stove pipe relationships.”
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