This sounds familiar – the US Government Services Administration is planning to create an online marketplace for agencies to buy Cloud Computing services by the end of the year.

David McClure, GSA’s associate administrator, told delegates at the Cloud/Gov 2012 event in Washington last week that the aim is to share resources and create a uniform procurement process culture. US government agencies will be able to offer excess storage, software-as-a-service and virtualization technology to other agencies for a fee.

“We’ve been trying with this on and off for the last couple decades,” commented McClure. “I think we now have a perfect storm. We have a budget crisis, a new wave of technology that’s actually entered in [to the government]. We have a new generation of CIO and IT leadership in the federal government that I think is very open to this kind of environment.”

McClure has experience of this sort of thing. He’s been at the helm of FedRAMP, the US federal government’s program to develop a uniform framework for federal Cloud solutions. FedRAMP is currently in the prelaunch phase, with the initial, phased rollout scheduled to begin in June.

The FedRAMP initiative follows the Obama administration’s “Cloud First” directive that compels government procurement to prioritise Cloud services.

Speaking at the same event, Salesforce.com’s senior vice president of public policy declared that the Cloud Computing debate is effectively over. “It’s over in the public sector and government because there is no vendor, there is no integrator, there is no consultant out there who says the Cloud is not the way to go,” he declared. “So everyone realises that it is inevitable that the federal government, just like state and local governments, will shift to Cloud platforms, Cloud infrastructures, Cloud applications, and that that train has left the station.”

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