Up in the cloud!

Public Sector Partner Briefing – Government Track 27th of Sep London,

Wonderful time of the year in London, drizzly pleasant weather – Fall is well on its way! MS campus in Reading is where partners from the UK and around the world were invited to a full-day public sector partner briefing. The agenda included plenary session with around 250 partners turnout and vertical-specific sessions, where partners split out between 4 tracks: Local Gov/Central Gov/Health/Education.

True to my customers, I picked the LRG track where all the hype was around : Shared Services with scalability in mind, cloud computing, Software as a Service (Saas), Infrastructure as a services (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) as means towards cost-cutting while increasing productivity.

Georgina O’Toole from TechMarketView gave a thorough analysis of the UK public sector Software and IT Services ( SITS) market and the forecast of 2011, TMV forecasted five years of decline in the UK SITS. With central government SITS spend down by nearly 30% before recovery and an exciting 3.6% increase in LRG SITS spend; hence, the LRG track was quite popular and that is where I had spent the entire afternoon.

Other areas of interest covered by MS team included:

– A lot of potential in BPO in local Gov

-Interoperability: Azure SDK for Java, PHP to enable the development and deployment of diverse applications on Windows Azure

– OData protocol is believed to be a front runner that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today

Glimpses on Citizen Service Platform 2.0 and what its appstore has to offer, lots of food for thought for a busy, last quarter 2010.