Amido is a London-based supplier of cloud-first solutions for both private and public sector organisations. We recently sat down with its Chief Delivery Officer, Chris Gray, to find out more.
Welcome to the Digital Marketplace Contenders, Chris. Let’s start by you telling us about your company; what is Amido’s value proposition?
Sure! Amido is an independent technical consultancy that specialises in implementing cloud-first solutions. We help our clients build resilience at scale, flexibility for the future and differentiation of customer experience while also minimising their business-risk and build-cost.
We’re different to a lot of our competitors because we have a strong ‘buy’ rather than ‘build’ methodology – we assemble and integrate proven technologies, often building solutions around an existing core, rather than advising our clients to rip out and replace current systems.
And as we’re very vendor agnostic, we’re better enabled to build solutions that fit the client’s every need rather than limiting ourselves to off-the-shelf products. As a result, Amido clients benefit from reduced build times, diminished costs and revolutionised capabilities that drive big internal efficiencies and reduce admin burdens for internal staff.
What’s the relevance of all this for the public sector?
Since 2013 the government has been championing a new way of thinking, favouring a ‘cloud first’ policy as part of its Technology Code of Practice, providing new opportunities for public sector organisations to source IT.
Couple this with the emerging trend over the past few years of central government favouring trying to favour smaller contracts, and the result’s been a market previously dominated by enterprises like Capita, Accenture and Capgemini, definitely opening up to SMEs.
Though there has been significant progress, so much more can be done to improve how public-sector technology is delivered. That’s why over the last year we have been expanding our client roster from central government to now include housing associations, the NHS and local authorities.
What’s been key to your success in the UK public sector?
Despite being relatively new entrants to G-Cloud and The Digital Marketplace, we’ve expanded at pace, with 45% of our annual revenue now attributed to public sector contracts. I put our success down to the fact that we’re coming at this with years of expertise and knowledge in our field. Regardless of the sector, though, all sorts of organisations benefit from solutions that reduce IT overheads, transform businesses and improve human experiences.
So what is your involvement with G9?
As a cloud services company, our main focus within The Digital Marketplace has been under the Cloud Support banner of G-Cloud. So far, these projects are a result of third-party partnerships with other organisations within the Digital Marketplace community. However, in the coming months we have high hopes that we will begin engaging directly with opportunities within both the DOS and G-Cloud frameworks.
How did you find the process of on-boarding onto the Marketplace? Do you have any guidance for others on the basis of that experience?
We found the on-boarding process simple, if not a little time-consuming, as government contractual documents can be quite substantial. Having said that, the Marketplace is significantly better than the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) process and allows for closer collaboration and negotiations with public sector clients during the pre-sales process.
The only bit of guidance I can really give is that winning work on DOS is to accept it’s a learning curve, and getting used to responding to opportunities in the way demanded is essential to your success on this framework.
If Think Digital Partners came back to talk to you in a year, what would you like to be able to say you’d achieved in the public sector?
Simple – that over the past year we have rapidly expanded into the public sector, with a significant portion of our revenue now linked to public sector clients. Over the next year we would also like to see this level of success continue as we continue to grow our client catalogue, as well as see an increase in direct engagements within both G-Cloud and DOS.
