The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) has signed a memorandum of understanding with IBM on preferential commercial terms for the public sector on its cloud services.
They have agreed on a three-year arrangement that will give public sector bodies discounts on access to the IBM public cloud and a suite of solutions including its Multicloud Manager, Cloud Paks, Red Hat OpenShjift, Cloud Garages, Power Virtual Servers on cloud, VMware and cloud migration services.
It is the latest in a series of MoUs between CCS and cloud service providers: in recent months it has announced agreements with Microsoft, Google Cloud and UKCloud.
IBM said its public cloud has been built on a foundation of open software and includes more than 190 cloud native APIs for technologies including artificial intelligence, blockchain, IoT and DevOps.
It also runs a secure local facility as part of the Ark Data Centres joint venture to meet high security classification levels for UK government.
Simon Tse, chief executive of CCS, said: “This agreement with IBM provides great value for public sector organisations as they continue to innovate and improve essential services for citizens throughout the UK.”
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