Outsourcery is crowing about the O-Cloud platform receiving pan government accreditation - IL2 in old money - that will allow it to unleash IaaS and hosted Microsoft apps on tech buyers in the Digital Marketplace. This does not give the loss-making purveyor of cloudy stuff the keys to a particularly exclusive club; 17 other …

UK.gov's online IT services catalogue Cloud Store was downed by an error during a scheduled update by platform provider Procserve, The Channel understands. An outage occurred yesterday morning that prevented suppliers from logging into the portal and public sector IT heads from searching for the requisite services. The web shop …

Update A glitch in the UK's IT shopping catalogue Cloud Store is preventing access for suppliers and public sector buyers. The team running the G-Cloud Twitter feed admitted before midday that there were "still issues" with the online service, and said it was working with Gov E-Marketplace to resolve them. In the latest update about …

The G-Cloud governor has apologised to public sector customers for the Cloud Store outage yesterday but pointed out that downtime is not confined to an off-premise delivery model. The apps store is hosted on the Azure platform, which was down for eight hours, although the Cloud Store was only out of action for roughly a quarter …

CeBit If selling software is one way to make money, selling other people's software is an even easier way to make money – just take a look at the App Store. Fujitsu is importing the app store model into enterprise software, opening up a Business Solutions Store, where users can browse apps and buy subscriptions to software services by …

IT and comms suppliers are unable to tweak their entries in the government's Cloud Store because the only mechanism to do this is not working properly. The first tranche of Blighty's public sector cloud framework was released to market on Sunday, an online catalogue including 1,700 services - though not all are yet available - …

G-Cloud governor Chris Chant has defended the standards adopted to construct the Cloud Store framework and the length of contracts on offer. As revealed by The Register last week, storage integrator Proact wrote a letter to Chant criticising the recently launched online cloud services marketplace and explaining its reasons for …

The Cabinet Office reckons three-quarters of the contracts dished out on public sector IT services catalogue Cloud Store have gone to SMEs. The claim was made in response to feedback given to The Channel from some suppliers who suspect G-Cloud biz is dominated by the same integrators that monopolised wider public sector IT …

G-Cloud bigwig Chris Chant has confirmed the second wave of Cloud Store services will go live in April and that public sector customers will finally be able to rate suppliers, helping to shore up the flaky accreditation process. The Cloud Store has come in for a fair share of criticism – as well as applause – after its speedy …

The government is cutting the number of its ICT frameworks from 26 down to just 10 - a move that has been criticised for leaving SMEs in the dark. The strategy will initially reduce the number of frameworks down to 16, but as more agreements expire that number will decrease to 10. The new frameworks will typically last for …

Analysis Cloud operator Rackspace has hopped over to Israel and returned with a secret weapon that could give it capabilities hard to find in Amazon and Microsoft clouds. The weapon? ZeroVM, an open-source lightweight hypervisor that presents a single-threaded environment and can be spun up in as little as 5 milliseconds. It is based on …

Public sector adoption of the cloud is some two years behind the private sector and suppliers, as well as government, need to up their game to raise awareness. Just £2.7m was finally spent by government IT bods on the first iteration of of its cloud computing framework - G-Cloud - indeed it seems a shift away from traditional …

The Cabinet Office has insisted the multi-billion pound software and hardware framework that is about to surface will complement and not overshadow its cloud-first policy. At the end of October, some £63.4m had been transacted on CloudStore since its launch in March 2012. The web catalogue lists accredited public sector …

The race is on in the channel to pocket the first G-Cloud pan-government accreditation for infrastructure- and software-as-a-service platforms. The awards will be made this month but industry sources tell The Channel that Memset, Skyscape, SCC and FCO Services (the IT arm of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office) are in the running …

Google's iPhone/iPad G Drive app tries to take on Dropbox. It does its basic job reaosnably well, despite a crappy captcha. And here it is: IOSicons The idea is you can access your files in Google Drive that have been uploaded from a Mac or PC. You download the app on your iPhone easily enough from the App Store and it …

Nearly two years into the CloudStore experiment and the government is still working out ways to motivate more public sector tech procurement heads to actually use the e-tool. As the end of January, a total of £92.6m has been transacted via the web catalogue that now includes an eye-watering 13,000 services from nearly 1,900 …

The storage landscape is changing. The storage products and skills needed for a small firm have so far been very different from those needed in large enterprises. Yet we now have some storage vendors delivering enterprise-class products aimed at workgroups, while some enterprise buyers choose mid-range products to save money. …

Five years after he stepped down from day-to-day involvement in Microsoft, co-founder and chairman Bill Gates has revealed his frustration that Windows Vista's database-like file system never saw daylight. In a question'n'answers session on the wildly popular cat'n'chat board Reddit, the world's richest geek was asked: “What …

The UK Cabinet Office says as much as £100m of public-sector IT contracts are now up for grabs for the 458 cloud services providers approved by Whitehall. All the government needs to do now is teach IT buyers in the public sector how to actually use the newly launched UK.gov G-Cloud 2 CloudStore, Blighty's online procurement …

US book distributor ReaderLink will be pushing German firm txtr's impossibly cheap ereader into US grocery and drug stores, launching a new cloud platform which will also support the devices. The cheap ereaders cost a mere €10 on this side of the pond, but dollar pricing has not yet been announced. Txtr's Beagle ereader was …

Exclusive Fujitsu Technology Solutions is in talks with Microsoft which could see it offer Redmond’s Office Application suite via the Personal Cloud Service, which the Japanese tech firm hopes to trial with customers next year. The server and services firm unveiled its Personal Cloud service at its user Forum event in Munich last week, …

Who are the ten most influential storage bosses? It should be an easy list to make but what do we mean by influential and should they be currently in post? "Influential" means more than that just "our customers have bought boatloads of our kit!" An influential company's competitors have had to react to its products and strategy …

EMC's Atmos cloud storage product has competition coming: WOS, the Web-Optimised Scaler from DataDirect Networks. DataDirect (DDN) supplies high-bandwidth, hardware-accelerated, block storage arrays to the high-performance computing (HPC) and rich media markets. Think of it as a SAN array on steroids, the block equivalent of a …

Amazon's foray into mobile applications is getting firmer, with the company's approach to copy protection showing how it plans to differentiate itself from Google's Marketplace, or not. Amazon Appstore Digital Rights Management apparently "simplifies life for developers and customers", but only by virtue of operating on …

The government expects to cut at least £100m off its annual personal computing bill under an HMRC led standardisation program. The savings are expected in procurement, services and management, as departments eliminate waste, duplication and overspend, HM Revenue and Customs' Nigel Green told the Government ICT Conference in …

The world's governments have had their say about new generic top level domains (gTLDs), lodging more than 200 objections laid to proposed new names. Australia, oddly, leads the list of complainants, racking up more than 100 with objections to .sucks and .wtf (on grounds that the name has “has an overtly negative or critical …