The government’s IT procurement service G-Cloud racked up £5.5m in sales throughout June, its second-highest monthly sales total since the scheme launched in early 2012, taking overall sales to £31.1m.

A series of deals made by the Home Office with IT services stalwart IBM makes up a significant proportion of sales, despite the G-Cloud being set up by the Cabinet Office to increase public sector spending on SME vendors.

The Home Office’s multiple deals with Big Blue total a little over £2m, just over a third of the total G-Cloud spending for June. It included maintenance costs of £861,000 and live support spending of £558,000.

These big sales, combined with other transactions, resulted in SME spending adding up to just 38.3 percent of the overall spend, below the total percentage of 56.5 for all previous months.

The Cabinet Office makes clear that sales figures for June may not be final as they stand, as more figures may arrive from businesses later.

The scheme is currently under the watchful eye of the Office of Fair Trading, which launched a probe last month to ensure that big vendors such as IBM and Microsoft are not shutting SMEs out of the government IT procurement market, while also ensuring that taxpayers were getting good value for money from taxpayers.

Elsewhere, the Department for Transport spent £200,000 with multinational defence company QINETIQ on enterprise licences. The largest sale made by an SME was by NextiraOne UK, for an Aberdeen data centre for the Maritime and Coastguard agency in a £175,000 deal.

This record month sees G-Cloud begin to shake its reputation of underuse, with the team undergoing a budget and personnel increase last month to allow for further expansions, doubling its staff count to 10.

G-Cloud has also been taken under the wing of the larger Government Digital Service (GDS) to ensure that public sector bodies adhere the government’s cloud-first policy.