Government has announced an agreement with Salesforce that will enable organisations across the public sector to achieve “significant savings” on the firm’s products and services.
The Crown Commercial Service has announced that it has successfully negotiated a one-year memorandum of understanding with the cloud software company. The arrangement, which can be applied to all new engagements, will offer public bodies a “baseline of Salesforce pricing and discounts”. CCS did not provide precise detail on the level of savings to be offered.
In addition to the flagship cloud-based CRM offering, the discounts can also be applied to products from Salesforce-owned companies such as integration software specialist Mulesoft, data visualisation firm Tableau, and communications platform Slack.
To take advantage of the Salesforce arrangement, CCS advises public sector entities to use the Back Office Software framework – although the discounted pricing will also be offered through other buying vehicles. The procurement agency is hosting two webinars in the coming weeks to provide further information on the MoU.
Philip Orumwense, chief technology procurement officer at CCS, said: “This MoU… will allow UK public sector customers to access a competitive baseline of pricing by recognising our aggregated public sector spend, and ensures a cost-effective marketplace with access to best-of-breed solutions for each requirement. The agreement will further ensure increased collaboration and aggregation of government and wider public sector spend to achieve increased automation, forecasting, reporting and customer engagement management tools.”
The savings offered by the agreement will be achieved by the US company effectively treating the UK public sector as single customer. CCS has previously announced similar arrangements with an array of cloud services providers, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services, UKCloud, IBM, Oracle and HPE.
The agreement with AWS has been far more frequently used than any of those with rival cloud vendors, with government departments using the arrangement to spend hundreds of millions of pounds with the cloud vendor.
PublicTechnology exclusively revealed last year that the arrangement includes a standard 18% discount on AWS hosting services, with an additional 2% available for public bodies that pay upfront. To take advantage of these savings, buyers must enter into a three-year contract with the cloud firm.