“’Seeding the schedules cloud’ means addressing 1980s-era Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) pricing policies that limit access to 21st-Century commercial solutions, especially leading-edge commercial technologies, like cloud computing. By so doing, the General Services Administration can increase agency access to best value commercial products, services, and solutions.
MAS consolidation has eliminated contracting stovepipes, duplication, and process burdens at the contract level. The next step for GSA is to streamline, reform, and enhance the underlying pricing policies governing contract negotiation, award, and compliance. Reforming these underlying pricing policies will unleash the MAS program, enhancing best value mission support by focusing on increasing commercial market access and competition at the task order level.
Nowhere will this effort be more impactful than in the MAS program’s cloud computing offerings. The federal government is scratching the surface on cloud, with the federal market for cloud expected to grow to over $8.5 billion in the next few years according to Bloomberg Government. Cloud enables data analytics, machine learning, and AI — capabilities that are the focus of government modernization. Moreover, the pandemic has served to accelerate the commercial cloud transition and usage, with remote work and virtual offices driving demand. Given the growing demand for cloud, the MAS program has the opportunity to leverage the commercial market to deliver increased capabilities to support agency IT needs. So, pricing reform clearly is a game changer…” Read the full article here.
Source: ‘Seeding the schedules cloud’ – what’s the forecast? – By Roger Waldron, February 19, 2021. Federal News Network.
Tagged: cloud, General Services Administration (GSA), reference, XTRA
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