HPE has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the British government's Crown Commercial Service to help bring public services to the cloud for cheaper.

The CCS provides commercial services to the public sector and, and the MoU will allow its clients to receive a minimum agreed discounts on HPE services, including GreenLake, Aruba enterprise networking and security offerings, and the firm's storage and compute products.

Bulk purchase discount

This move is part of the UK's One Government Cloud Strategy officially launched in 2020, the strategy is a cross-departmental implementation policy of cloud services. The groundwork and research were carried out by the UK government in 2019. A series of workshops were convened between senior commercial and technical experts from across the public sector to discuss how agencies used the cloud and what challenges they faced.

This strategy, as a result, was implemented to standardize the myriad of departments and public bodies and their own approaches to cloud services in order to keep costs checked and establish what services were needed by which body.

Following the MoU, public sector organizations under the CCS can now leverage HPE’s edge to cloud solutions, including via the company’s partners.

Big Blue in the UK

This MoU follows a similar move by the CCS in July when it signed a three year agreement with IBM.

Under that agreement, government organizations such as local authorities, education, and the National Health Service would have access to cheaper services from IBM. Such access provides UK agencies with solutions from IBM Multicloud Manager, IBM Cloud Paks, Red Hat OpenShift, Cloud Garages, Power Virtual Servers on Cloud, VMware, and Cloud Migration Services.

UKCloud, Google, and Microsoft also have agreements in place.