A very Salesforce Xmas: GSA inks blanket 5-year, $503M deal with partners

The General Services Administration has struck a five-year, $503 million blanket purchase agreement with Salesforce implementation partners to offer federal agencies the chance to share and reuse applications, code and best practices.

The Salesforce Implementation, Integration and Support Services BPA consolidates the government’s array of development, support and operation needs from the cloud computing and customer relationship management company into one procurement vehicle, reducing duplicative contracts across federal agencies.

“The Salesforce BPA is a significant step forward in supporting [the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act], our customers, and improving acquisition efficiency and effectiveness in the Federal Government,” said Tom Sharpe, commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service. “This unique, first-of-its-kind, cross-agency initiative will reduce the number of duplicative contracts for these services and lower overall costs by leveraging the buying power of the government into a consolidated services vehicle.”

GSA awarded the BPA on IT Schedule 70 to six Salesforce partners: Accenture, Acumen, Capgemini, Deloitte, Phase One and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The agency said in a announcement that the procurement was open competitively to “vendors offering Salesforce integration and implementation services on GSA’s IT Schedule 70, leveraging government spending power and consolidating requirements from multiple agencies.” The contract can “support the development of hundreds of shareable cloud applications and public-facing community portals as well as tens of thousands of users,” according to GSA.

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This BPA fits into the administration guidance issued this week that pushes for agencies’ more centralized management of software licenses and greater consolidation of contracts for software used governmentwide, in accordance the government’s shift to category management procurement through the Common Acquisition Platform.

“This new solution brings together the best of the Administration’s efforts to drive category management and increase innovation in the delivery of IT,” U.S. Chief Acquisition Officer Anne Rung said. “By driving agencies to these BPAs, we will be able to leverage industry’s agile talent while ensuring that we deliver the best value for the American taxpayer.”

In a blog announcing the administration’s new software guidance, Rung, with U.S. Chief Information Officer Tony Scott, explained how this BPA could save agencies big bucks.

“In fact, agencies can potentially save between 50 and 80 percent on application development costs by reusing code that the government has already paid for,” they wrote. “For example, if an application costs $500k to build from scratch, agencies could save between $250k and $400k by leveraging existing applications shared on GSA Labs.”

GSA is still in the process of developing the ordering guide for this contract.

Correction: Dec. 23, 2015

An earlier version of this story listed PhaseOne as an awardee under the contract. The correct awardee is Phase One.