Government denies G-Cloud cancellation claims

The Cabinet Office has denied claims the government has canned its G-Cloud project.

Nick Wilson, managing director of HP UK, is reported as saying the coalition dropped the cloud initiative in favour of a datacentre consolidation plan.

A spokesman from the Cabinet Office said: "We absolutely deny this is the case." The spokesman added he was unable to discuss whether the strategy is to concentrate on datacentre consolidation.

A supplier working close to the G-Cloud project told Computer Weekly he had not heard of the project’s cancellation, but said work on the programme is much less intense compared to 15 months ago.

The claims follows a notable omission of the term "G-Cloud" from the government’s recent IT strategy.

Bill McCluggage, deputy government CIO, denied this meant the project is due to be wound down. "We have not torn up that work, there is a lot of exceptionally valuable information there, which will act as a foundation moving ahead with cloud computing and as we build up our ecosystem," he told Computer Weekly at the time.

HP claimed the comments were taken out of context. "Nick Wilson said the first priority for government was to look at datacentre consolidation, after which topics like G-Cloud would be addressed. As with many commercial clients, the process of datacentre consolidation is often a first step towards use of cloud," said HP.

"HP continues to have fruitful dialogue with the government on topics such as G-cloud and datacentre consolidation," HP added.