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Whitehall's G-Cloud: Hype or hope?

Big-swinging reform or buzzword bingo?

Embedded Microsoft

Given the UK government's huge reliance on Microsoft, isn't it a foregone conclusion that it should therefore go with Microsoft on G-Cloud in the same way it has gone with those other established, big suppliers of technology?

Ferrar puzzles at this and rejects the proposition. "It kind of implies the government is locked in [to Microsoft], when we don't feel they are," he says.

"I'm sat here 18 months into being Microsoft and you go back and look back and say: 'How did we end up like that?' and it's tough being asked to justify the success of a product that's been successfully marketed and does the right thing, for the right people, at the right time, and that allows them to collaborate in rich and varied ways."

One thing Ferrar does takes exception to is what he says is conflation between open standards and open source on the subject of cloud. "There are people trying to weave the two together, saying you can only have open standards if you have open source – and that's simply not true," he says.

Ferrar doesn't name names but insists there is a general level of discussion – some might call it a consensus – among developers working in the industry that the cloud will be built using open source. You have, for example, projects such as Open Stack trying to build a "Linux for the cloud" using a community model and released under an Apache licence. Amazon and Google, meanwhile, run on versions of Linux, not Windows – although Amazon does offer Windows instances for Redmond fans.

If you read the GPL, free means free as in freedom of speech, not free as in free beer. Stuff like that has cost of deployment and cost to patch it. – Mark Ferrar

"I'm unclear how or why these things need to be linked," Ferrar says. Proprietary products are still compliant with open standards."

He highlights Microsoft work that mixes the kinds of open-source being touted for the cloud with Microsoft's software: specifically putting Hadoop to crunch large batch jobs on Windows Azure and SQL Server. Before that, there was improved interoperability for MySQL and PHP on Windows and between Linux and Microsoft's Hyper-V, he said. "Microsoft has changed. Microsoft is a different animal to what it was five yeas ago," he says.

In combating open source, Ferrar talks total-cost-of ownership – a favoured weapon used by Microsoftees when they are trying to persuade you that Windows is better. The argument runs that support, training and maintenance come with a licence that is paid for – but that you will pay extra for such essentials when it comes to open source and Linux, whose purchase price is "free".

"We need to get away from this implicit concept that this is free – free 'no cost'," he says. "If you read the GPL, free means free as in freedom of speech not free as in free beer. Stuff like that has cost of deployment and cost to patch it. When you buy your Windows licence you get the cost to patch it."

Apparently this is what Ferrar told Francis Maude in July 2010 at a big CIO CTO council meeting, just before Ferrar jumped to Microsoft. Ferrar left the civil service for Microsoft in October that year.

Is Microsoft worried that the proposed change to government's IT to favour cloud services and SMBs will put Microsoft at a disadvantage? Microsoft, after all, built a 30-plus-year business selling licences for client and server operating systems, Office, email and collaboration software. Not according to Ferrar: "We embrace the change," he said. "We are embracing the change to open data."

Cloud-ready?

But is Microsoft even ready for cloud, given February's outage?

We spoke to Ferrar before the leap-year crash. At that time, Ferrar reckoned the UK government had come to Microsoft – together with application integration partner Solidsoft – to put Cloudstore on Windows Azure because it "didn't want a fiasco with the thing rolling over."

What about now?

Following up afterwards, Ferrar pointed to the fact that Microsoft had been "open" about the cause of the outage. "We will strive to continue to be transparent with customers when incidents occur using the learning to advance our engineering, operations, communications and customer support and improve our service," he said.

It's early days for government cloud, both in the evolution of G-Cloud and the government actually taking its data and apps off existing servers.

Booby traps await, especially in data – where there are the rules that are supposed to govern this stuff alongside proposed standards that are works-in-progress. Despite this, the big-name tech vendors have already been signed up to G-Cloud. Their presence is bound to ensure standards that emerge suit their plans.

Microsoft's man has worked both sides of the public-sector street – on big, centralised projects as a customer and now as an IT supplier, somebody pushing cloud. Ferrar is optimistic: "Government would benefit from a diving towards greater shared agenda – sharing solutions," he says.

And that, it would seem, means cloud. ®

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