Earlier this year, the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) announced that it had secured preferential pricing on a mix of Microsoft cloud services for public sector organisations through to 30 April 2021.

CCS signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Microsoft to ensure eligible public sector organisations continue to receive discounts on its cloud products.

The Digital Transformation Arrangement (DTA), as it’s called, will run for three years and will feature bespoke, public sector-focused product packages around cloud security and compliance, as well as Office 365 and Windows 10 offerings.

The DTA packaging and pricing attracted a good deal of concern and criticism from Socitm members. In June, we responded by contacting CCS and members’ concerns were conveyed to Microsoft the following month. CCS also offered to help individual councils with any proposals that they were currently considering.

Since then, Microsoft has announced further price increases to take effect in November 2018, generating further representations from councils to the Local Government Association (LGA) and ourselves.

Socitm, working with the LGA and CCS, has been engaging with our Microsoft colleagues to ensure that we are taking a leading position in conveying the issues and challenges facing the local government sector. These include the sector’s experience with the escalating costs of Microsoft’s products and services and the sometimes poor exploitation of the investments that have been made.

We have also contacted our LOLA international colleagues to ascertain whether they have similar experiences to share and whether they would be interested in making joint representations to Microsoft.

This briefing note reveals the list of actions generated from a meeting with Microsoft on 29 October.