Aus govt CTO reveals cloud services panel overhaul

Australian government CTO John Sheridan has revealed the federal government is looking to rework the terms for its young cloud services panel to allow more vendors to participate. 

The proposal was detailed at the Connect Expo in Melbourne today. Sheridan said the federal government would go out to market for new suppliers to refresh the panel later this week. 

The federal government debuted the non-compulsory cloud services panel, a replacement of the former data centre-as-a-service procurement panel, in February last year with 49 initial vendors.

It covered platform-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service and other specialist services like systems integration. A cloud catalogue allows agencies to navigate various offerings and request quotes. 

But Sheridan today revealed that following agency feedback, his office would remove category descriptions to "make it simpler for vendors to get on the panel".

"They will have to offer one service that will have to be assessed. Once they have one service that has been assessed as offering value for money, they will be able to add additional services to the online services catalogue," Sheridan said.

"We will put them into the right categories, but we won't limit categories as we have at the moment. 

"And we will enable them then to add new services as they develop. We think this will bring faster work to the market, allow people to take advantage of changes, and make it easier for agencies to buy the services they need."

Sheridan credited the federal government's cloud-first mandate for increased adoption of cloud services, and highlighted the example of the Drupal-based GovCMS content management system as an example of a cloud services success story. 

"Our most ambitious understanding of what we could do in a year with this work was 40 websites up in the first year, and we went over that target in the first year," he said. 

"We currently have 61 websites, including one state government, and a large queue of websites and a large number of agencies in every jurisdiction looking to do more in this area."

Andrew Sadauskas attended the Connect Expo as a guest of Intel.