CloudStore spend hits £450,000, almost all with Huddle

More than £450,000 has been spent through the government's CloudStore in its first two months of operation, according to the Cabinet Office.

The CloudStore, which opened in February, allows public sector organisations to purchase cloud services from an online catalogue.

£453,778 has been spent through the CloudStore in total in February and March of which £439,978 was spent on Software-as-a-Service, and the remaining £13,800 on what the Cabinet Office calls "specialist cloud services".

The two purchases made under "specialist cloud services" were both made from Emergn: one by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency for £8,000 of agile training, and the other for £5,800 by the Department for International Development.

In contrast, nine Software-as-a-Service purchases have been made through the CloudStore, six of which went to enterprise collaboration software company Huddle.

Huddle notched up £407,011 of purchases through the CloudStore, the biggest of which, costing £251,000, was made by the Ministry of Justice.

The three non-Huddle deals went to Amee, GovDelivery and Microsoft.

There are four categories of services that can be bought through the CloudStore: along with specialist cloud services and Software-as-a-Service, public-sector buyers can also get Platform- and Infrastructure-as-a-service. No purchases have been made from the two latter categories so far.

The Cabinet Office has previously estimated the cost of the CloudStore at £4.93m and the savings it should generate the public sector at £340m by 2015. However, the department has not been able to explain how it reached these figures.