By Victoria Ho

SINGAPORE - The envisioned massive government cloud will be built, and Singapore has given the job to SingTel.

Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) CEO Ronnie Tay announced yesterday that the five-year tender for the "G-Cloud" has been awarded to SingTel.

The G-Cloud, to be used by all the various public agencies, will be ready as early as the end of this year, he said.

The tender was called on Oct 10 last year.

The exact value of the project was not announced, but reports peg it as a multi-million dollar win for SingTel.

The public service employs about 127,000 officers across 15 ministries and 50 statutory boards.

The G-Gloud marks a pivotal change in the way the government procures its IT resources.

Typically, IT resources such as servers used by each public agency is operated and maintained internally.

One of the purported benefits of using a centralised cloud is the opportunity to pool resources across the various agencies.

This helps to reap economies of scale in IT manpower, as well as in computing and storage resources.

The G-Cloud will also be used to run shared services such as the SingPass e-authentication system that is used by citizens to log into multiple public agency online services.

Under the tender, SingTel will put up the capital resources necessary to set up the infrastructure first. Agencies using the cloud will pay subscription fees for it.

Other country governments have also been moving to the centralised procurement model.

The UK G cloud tender attracted more than 250 responses, one of its government officials said late last year.

New as the G-Cloud is, the government isn't new to the concept. It called a cloud bulk tender in 2010, which pre-qualified vendors to offer cloud services to agencies.

SingTel is one of the vendors which has participated in the bulk tender, in addition to StarHub, CrimsonLogic, Microsoft, PTC System and NewMedia Express.

The EnVision service was also set up in 2010 in order to host streaming videos.