CloudForce London: the UK Govt needs to buck up its Cloud ideas, says Benioff

Posted by Stuart Lauchlan on Wed, 14/09/2011 - 14:21

With the UK government’s national Cloud Computing strategy only weeks away from publication, Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude met with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff on Tuesday – and seems to have been told some potentially uncomfortable home truths.

At the CloudForce conference in London, Benioff declared:

“The UK government needs to get aggressive about Cloud services. The UK is way behind in this – and way too much into virtualisation and the G-Cloud, which is a big virtual machine that has not been executed well. Too much cost has gone into running too many data centres. ”

In the US, Salesforce.com has been working on attaining necessary certifications to pitch into the government sector there. Benioff argues that Cloud is an absolutely obvious solution for public sector woes:

“It’s all about cost reduction. The US has 3500 data centres with single digit utlilisation rates. It’s the same in the UK – single digit utilisation. That is not OK. It’s costing them a fortune. ”

Benioff attributed much of the US government’s progress in the Cloud to former White House CIO Vivek Kundra – who was a keynote speaker at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco earlier this month:

“We were fortunate to have such an aggressive regulator as him. He said the US government had to take a position of ‘Cloud First’. Vivek also said that public governments need to stop hiding behind private Clouds and that it’s the public Cloud that will provide the cost-arbitrage that governments need to have. ”

The Cloud Computing strategy will insist on Cloud services providers to government having UK based data centres. Salesforce.com still plans to open a London-based centre in 2012 and is in the final stages of selecting a partner from a short list of four. Benioff concluded:

“There is a great opportunity for government which tends to be bloated and not changing fast enough. And government has to stop hiding behind the private Cloud. ”