The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) has renewed its preferential pricing agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for public sector IT buyers. The agreement, known as the One Government Value Agreement (OGVA), offers discounted prices on AWS products and services. While details of the discounts for the new iteration, OGVA 2.0, have not been disclosed, CCS has confirmed that it will provide even greater financial benefits to users. The initial OGVA agreement, in effect since October 2020, has been utilized by at least 15 public sector bodies, with contracts totaling £317.2m. The largest contract, worth £120m, involved AWS providing public cloud hosting services to the Home Office, and is set to expire in December 2023. The next Home Office contract, valued at £450m over three years, will be under OGVA 2.0. CCS stated that the scheme allows the entire public sector to benefit from discounts by treating it as one customer. The launch of OGVA 2.0 was not publicly announced, leading to speculation that it is related to the ongoing investigation by the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) into AWS and Microsoft. The CMA investigation is examining whether committed spend discounts, such as OGVA, are negatively impacting the competitiveness of the UK cloud market. Concerns have been raised about renewing schemes like OGVA while the investigation is ongoing, with calls for greater transparency.
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