HP Helps UK SMEs With G-Cloud 5 procurement

HP Enterprise Services has committed to assisting small and medium enterprises [SMEs] to compete for public sector business with 200 additional services designed to help them benefit from G-Cloud 5.

The new services are being implemented to assist SMEs that don’t have their own accreditation to compete for public sector contracts that they would otherwise be ineligible for, by using a program that is dubbed SMEngage.

“HP’s new G-Cloud 5 offerings provide SMEs with a low-cost entry point into the secure IT services market,”said Stuart Bladen, regional vice president, UK Public Sector, HP. “Through our SMEngage program, HP gives SMEs the opportunity to be involved in public sector projects. Around a third of the companies in our UK supply chain – nearly 600 individual businesses – are SMEs.”

HP already offers pay-per-use cloud services and in addition to this it will also be debuting desktop services with messaging and communications options through G-Cloud 5. Additional HP workplace services will also make the procurement process simpler and assist in garnering additional business in the public sector.

All of the services offered come from HP-owned UK data centres that meet energy efficiency targets and everything offered by HP when it comes to cloud services meets the government’s strict security accreditation criteria.

In this regard HP’s Government Virtual Private Cloud hosting service was recently handed the UK’s Pan-Government Accreditation at Impact Level 3 as well as Cloud Security Alliance Security Trust and Assurance Registry [CSASTAR] silver certification from the British Standards Institute [BSI].

The government launched G-Cloud 5 just two weeks ago along with a list of new guidelines that pushed various categories, such as co-location services, out of the CloudStore.

Image Credit: Flickr (Pierpaolo)