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TOOLS
Imagine a scenario in which you are tasked with a multimillion-dollar software
acquisition. You have limited experience with enterprise software terms
and conditions or market pricing, and you do not know the government’s
acquisition history about the software you intend to purchase.
TO ACHIEVE THE
BEST VALUE IN
commercial
SOFTWARE
ACQUISITIONS
I
f your time, funding and resources are constrained,
you may be forced to accept the
vendor’s quote and the software publisher’s
standard terms and conditions, and hopefully
achieve some additional value as a result of basic
research and negotiation. But even when you have
sufficient time, funding and resources for a more
methodical approach, where do you begin
To provide assistance, the Department of Defense
Enterprise Software Initiative (ESI) developed the
Best Value Toolkit for commercial software acquisition.
It includes a disciplined process, tools, guidance
and recommendations that enable an IT buyer to
obtain the “best value” on large enterprise software
acquisitions. The toolkit is available at www.esi.
mil/bestvaluetoolkit. A best value acquisition of
high-dollar enterprise software, whether spanning
a period of two months or 12, can be broken down
into four key areas: establishing requirements, referencing
existing contracts, identifying target price
and terms, and planning for negotiation with pricing
and terms and conditions.
Establishing Requirements
The first step in the requirements phase is to have
the end-use technical and management teams
identify and finalize current and future requirements.
This requires familiarity with the product, software
publisher licensing terms, desired licensing metric,
customer operating environment and the customer’s
planned physical, system or operational changes.
Also, prepare to answer the following questions:
» Does this purchase include all the products and
tools needed to fulfill current requirements
» What additional items or licenses might be
needed, now or later
» Can usage requirements be consolidated across
organizations, commands, outside the organization,
etc.
» Is there a licensing or usage metric (per processor,
named user, employee, enterprise license,
concurrent device, etc.) that best fits the needs
If not, can the requirements be adjusted Is this
software needed for one specific application or
can it be combined with other applications or
processes For multiple uses Are development
or user rights required
» Is a perpetual license, term license or Software as
a Service (SaaS) model preferred
By Floyd Groce and John Zettler
34 CHIPS www.doncio.navy.mil/chips Dedicated to Sharing Information - Technology - Experience CHIPS April – June 2012 35