Supplying to government

From OpenEGov

There's nothing different about the bidding process for supplying free software solutions - the supplying government site is a good place to start.

It is a requirement that tenders over a certain value must be placed on the EU 'ted' website. If competing for these in the UK, your company should ideally be registered with S-CAT.

I'm still trying to guess how the above works in reality. It appears that S-CAT is used to bypass the requirement of actually placing tenders on the EU web site (which certainly doesn't contain most recent tenders for my local council for example; or if it does, the search engine is faulty). Access to the tenders on S-CAT is then limited to companies registered, who have been preselected. Which appears to be yet another very cosy arrangement. Or am I missing something? Graham

On further reading, it appears that it is not possible to register as a supplier with S-CAT except by invitation. This is an almost entirely closed circle.

lgcnet.com aggregate tenders from local authorities placed in newspapers. However, this is all tenders, not just IT. (note: front page and registration are broken in Firefox, but the pdfs on the tenders page are fine).