Crown Commercial Service opens door to Salesforce

The government’s Crown Commercial Service has agreed a one-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Salesforce to make it easier and more cost-efficient, it says, for the public sector to use the supplier’s products and services.

As well as Salesforce’s homegrown sales and marketing software delivered over various clouds as a service, this agreement extends to the supplier’s acquired technologies, collaboration platform Slack and data visualisation provider Tableau.

Philip Orumwense, commercial director and chief technology procurement officer at the CCS, said: “I am delighted that Crown Commercial Service and Salesforce have been able to reach agreement on this MoU. It 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 CCS has issued similar Memoranda of Understanding with Oracle, and a swathe of other technology suppliers, including Amazon Web Services, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Workday and Google Cloud.

The MoU statement highlights relationship management, case management, collaboration, and analytics products and services among the capabilities that will be available to civil servants “on a rapidly configurable secure low-code platform”.

The CCS is the country’s largest public procurement organisation. In 2021 and 2022 it says it helped the public sector achieve “commercial benefits” of almost £3bn.

The main elements of the MoU are: a discount on licences, on data and applications integration platform Mulesoft as well as the other Salesforce technologies; free experimental projects; direct access to Salesforce’s small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) implementation partners; and discounted training and support.

A discounted trial of Salesforce’s Net Zero Cloud service is also bundled into the deal.

“From vaccine distribution to call centre operations, governments have seen at first-hand the power of what our technology can do for them and their citizens: delivering high-quality digital services, driving efficiencies and cost-effectiveness,” said Gavin Patterson, president and chief revenue officer at Salesforce.

“At Salesforce, we’re delighted that the MoU will support the work of our thriving ecosystem of UK SMEs, who provide vital implementation and training support to public bodies. We’re also proud to continue to build on our track record of enabling public service teams to deliver more, faster.”

The CCS is offering webinars to public sector organisations to gauge what they could gain from the MoU with Salesforce.