GSA is the US General Services Administration, a catch-all purchasing authority for the US federal government. Government purchasing is difficult, because spending taxpayer's money requires a good deal more transparency and fairness than needs to be exercised in the private sector. Doing "requests for proposals" is a lot of work, to write and evaluate, and many jurisdictions have routed around RFPs by creating the idea of a "standing order", a pre-negotiated contract for specific products or services. GSA creates standing orders for the entire federal government, so having a GSA contract allows you to sell to a lot of clients with a lot less paperwork.
So this is a big deal for Refractions, and now opens the door to the question: can we sell enough open source (and other) geospatial services to keep our GSA contract? GSA contracts are a use-it-or-lose-it affair, so we have to hit minimum sales targets or they rip it up.
3 comments:
Congratulations to you and the rest of the Refractions Team!!
Paul:
1) Better you than me!
2) Hopefully this will make OS a "safer" choice for the Feds.
3) Good timing with that other company supporting PostGIS in the next release.
4) Remember, some absurd amount of Federal contracts (20%? 30%?) are handed out in the last 30 days of the fiscal year (as agencies do the "use it or lose it" tap dance. So tell your Sales Team to get in a "Boiler Room" frame of mind in Aug/Sept.
Good Luck,
Brian
Congratulations! Hope it works out for you - If your team is able to quickly get up to speed on FARs and the quirks of federal contracting, hopefully that will go far. That's one area where some vendors and software providers run into problems.
Another area that still causes us some frustration is the bureacracy and overhead associated with deployment. There have been plenty of times where design and development were eclipsed by deployment.
If you're looking for any partners to help in OS geospatial integration in Federal space, my firm (Synergist Technology Group) is a SDVOSB, we have several federal contract vehicles and a footprint in several agencies.
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