HHS launches $100M Salesforce contract
The Department of Health and Human Services has centralized all its contracts for Salesforce services under a single $100 million departmentwide blanket purchasing agreement.
Salesforce announced Wednesday that HHS operating divisions, like the Center for Disease Control and Prevention or the National Institutes of Health, will now buy Salesforce offerings under the new BPA, leveraging strategic sourcing and economies of scale instead of striking their own individual deals with the cloud-based customer relationship management company.
“Prior to establishing this BPA, HHS saw a high demand for CRM tools across its divisions, but didn’t have a strategic sourcing vehicle for agency-wide purchasing of Salesforce subscriptions,” Dave Rey, executive vice president of public sector at Salesforce, told FedScoop in an email. “This lack of central management for IT spend and decision-making was costly and resulted in the use of disparate cloud and on-premises applications. With this BPA, HHS is leveraging additional buying power to make Salesforce more accessible and cost-efficient across HHS divisions.”
Rey said HHS divisions in the past have used Salesforce products to “act collaborative, transparent and engaged with citizens” and to “quickly and easily build new applications, making data accessible on any device for employees, and share those applications with one another.”
This deal follows in the footsteps of the General Services Administration’s $503 million governmentwide Salesforce BPA for integration, implementation and support services launched in December, but instead it’s focused purely on the centralized procurement of Salesforce products across HHS.
[Read more: GSA inks blanket 5-year, $503M deal with partners.]
“Used together, HHS has created an opportunity for each of its divisions to further invest in Salesforce solutions and share best practices and existing applications,” Rey told FedScoop.
HHS officials did not officially comment on the BPA, but according to those close to the deal, the vehicle has been up and running since November. Carahsoft, the primary contractor for the vehicle, has the one-year BPA listed on its website to expire Nov. 26, 2016, with an option to extend four years through 2020.
The department’s budget justification for its fiscal year 2017 request mentions the deal as a way it can approach software buying in the future. “Additionally we have been working closely with the Government Services Administration (sic) regarding establishment of a Salesforce services contract available for all federal agencies. Our strategic procurement group is working to determine our highest enterprise software needs across the department and identify or create supporting vehicles that will help us to meet our enterprise objectives.”
“In the consumer world, they say, ‘There’s an app for that.’ In the government world, they’re still saying, ‘There’s a form for that,’” Rey said.
“Now, government organizations are finally taking steps to be more collaborative across different departments rather than working in silos and are also making the change to use apps instead of paper forms. We see this BPA as a big step forward to accelerate digital transformation in the public sector.”
