Federal CIO calls for agencies to inventory licenses with ‘top 5 software vendors’

Newly installed Federal CIO Greg Barbaccia has called for agency CIOs to inventory licenses with the five software vendors that earn the most from federal contracts by April 2 as part of a larger software accounting initiative.

Barbaccia sent an email, obtained by FedScoop, to all federal CIOs on Monday requesting that agencies “complete a software license inventory to account for the full universe of software licenses at your agency.”

“Federal agencies are currently neglecting cost savings, making duplicative purchases, and failing to take advantage of economies of scale for software purchases. The first step to resolving this issue is to identify a comprehensive inventory to understand the entire catalog of vendors at each agency,” his email said.

To start, Barbaccia called for CIOs to identify licenses with the five software vendors who do the most business with the federal government: Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle and ServiceNow, per a 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office.

As that report explains, in fiscal 2021 across the largest 24 federal agencies, “10 vendors accounted for the majority of the most widely used licenses,” with Microsoft alone accounting for more than 31%.

“But it’s unclear which products under those licenses are most widely used because of agencies’ inconsistent and incomplete data,” the report states. “For example, multiple software products may be bundled into a single license with a vendor, and agencies may not have usage data for each product individually.”

The others on that list at the time were IBM, VMware, Cisco and McAfee, with ESRI and Google tied for tenth. VMware and McAfee have both since been acquired.

Additionally, the federal CIO wants an accounting of any “security logging and monitoring software, including, but not limited to Datadog, Elastic SAAS, Splunk, and Sumo Logic.”

Barbaccia has given CIOs until April 2 to inventory those licenses in a spreadsheet attached to the email he sent Monday.

Then, by April 30, he has called for a “full inventory of all software licenses and associated contracts.”

“We have the opportunity under this administration to reduce federal spending on IT by working smarter across the enterprise. I want to us [sic] transform how we approach software licensing in the federal government so we stop wasteful spending and still accomplish our mission for the taxpayer,” he said.

Barbaccia wrote in the email that he’s working in partnership with acting General Services Administration chief Stephen Ehikian and Kevin Rhodes, a newly hired senior advisor for the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, as part of the Trump administration’s “initiative to transform Federal spending on contracts.”

He adds that GSA “has piloted a process to collect the necessary data” and is “available to work with agencies that need help to collect their inventories.”

The email comes after President Donald Trump last week issued an executive order to consolidate all federal IT procurement — and most federal contracting in general — under GSA.

Barbaccia’s email calling for the inventorying of licenses with the top-five software vendors also follows a memo from GSA’s Ehikian last month pushing for federal agencies to terminate contracts with the top-10 highest-paid consulting firms.

Efforts to better wrangle federal software licenses aren’t new. Over the last decade, each administration has put its own mark on the greater struggle to reduce spending on commercial software.

Likewise, lawmakers have long tried to tackle the issue with legislation, including as recently as last year with the Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets (SAMOSA) Act. However, despite passing the House and touting a potential $5 billion a year in savings, the SAMOSA Act never made it through the Senate before the end of the previous term.