Sales on the government’s IT procurement service G-Cloud topped £25m in May, with £3.5m of purchases made by government departments and institutions since April.

This is slightly down on April’s spend of £4m, but that was significantly boosted by a £1.2m deal with IBM from the Home Office. This time round, many smaller but significant deals were brokered by a number of departments, including the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice and the NHS.

East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust shelled out £129,000 to InTechnology for a hosted eHealth service, in the largest single software and hardware transaction on the list. The service allows health professionals to update health records remotely, directly from a medical instrument.

Other notable deals included an spend of over £500,000 by the Home Office, with various vendors supplying hosting and server management solutions. Elsewhere, i2N secured a £110,000 deal with the Ministry of Justice, while Microsoft secured deals for a number of Office365 subscriptions. This included a deal worth £54,300 with Suffolk County Council.

The G-Cloud procurement scheme is designed to decrease overhead costs to IT departments as well as send more business the way of SMEs. Last week at the government’s Think G-Cloud event, the Home Office revealed that 62 percent of the G-Cloud spend has gone to SMEs.

V3 contacted the Cabinet Office for more insight into the latest figures, with regards SME spend, but had received no reply at the time of publication.

In the midst of perennial “under-use” of G-Cloud, the Home Office also insisted that public sector bodies had to take the scheme “more seriously” and encouraged IT spenders to “take a risk” on the platform.