Don’t count out resellers as OneGov agreements grow
Gettyimages.com/ Douglas Rissing
By
Nick Wakeman
Despite some early rhetoric about their demise, value-added resellers will keep an essential role in the General Services Administration's governmentwide IT buying strategy.
The General Services Administration initially said its OneGov strategy would diminish the role of value-added resellers and increase direct engagements with technology manufacturers.
But nine months in, the reality looks very different. GSA still needs resellers, just in a different role.
As discussed during OneGov panel at Friday's ACT-IAC Imagine Nation conference, resellers will continue to play a critical role in GSA"s unified procurement strategy. But whether resellers are the prime contractor or a partner to a technology company is an open question.
The panel included GSA officials such as Larry Hale, acting assistant commissioner of the Office of IT Category in the Federal Acquisition Service; and Warren Blankenship, deputy manager for the IT Government-wide Category in FAS.
Other speakers included Carl De Groot, vice president of federal for Cisco; and Lee Fisher, vice president of public sector of Docusign. Docusign has a OneGov agreement in place and Cisco does not, but De Groot said negotiations with GSA are taking place.
GSA has signed more than a dozen OneGov agreements with original equipment manufacturers, mainly software companies. The agreements have offered steep discounts and broader access to products to government buyers.
When GSA signed the first cohort of OneGov agreements in the spring, the agency indicated that the plan was to largely stop buying software through resellers. Panelists said those early OneGov agreements were not signed directly with the OEMs, but with resellers because most of the OEMs do not hold a GSA schedule.
In the months since, the rhetoric of cutting out the role for resellers has definitely softened.
Blankenship said during the panel that resellers, small businesses, and small business partners are important. He called the relationships ‘healthy for the ecosystem at large.”
Hale also cited the cooperation GSA has received from resellers as the agency has worked on the OneGov agreements.
“We couldn’t have gotten to where we are today without really active collaboration, cooperation and buy-in from resellers,” he said.
Now the talk is focused on a more fluid relationship, where sometimes the OEM will be the prime with the reseller as the partner. In other cases, it will be the opposite.
In answering the question of who plays what role, the panelists said the focus needs to be on how to best deliver to the customer.
“As we take on that prime role, potentially, the question is can we deliver at the pace the government needs us to,” said Cisco’s De Groot. “That’s a financial discussion. That’s a risk discussion to make sure we don’t devalue our relationships or branding across the federal government.”
De Groot said Cisco has invested heavily in partner relationships over its 40-year history and will not abandon that model, even as it potentially takes on more prime contractor roles.
OneGov is creating a closer relationship between the government and the OEM regardless of who the prime is. This new dynamic requires a new way of thinking about who is responsible for what.
Fisher of Docusign called it a segmented accountability model. For example, the OEM is responsible for the software’s integrity, which includes cybersecurity, uptime, and other compliance issues.
“Everything that we said the product was going to do when we sold it to you,” Fisher said.
The panel did not specifically say what resellers would be responsible for. But the implication is that the resellers would be responsible for integration with other technologies, post-sale support, requirements gathering and any customization that is needed.
GSA continues to negotiate more OneGov agreements and wants that initiative to be the first choice when agencies buy these products. But that will require a cultural change, particularly when agencies are negotiating options on existing contracts or getting ready to compete contracts for these products.
“We need our contracting officers across the government to be open to thinking about, can I use OneGov instead of exercising this option and keeping the old price,” Hale said. “That means contracting officers and acquisition professionals have to get out of their comfort zone.”