It's Time To Sell "As-A-Service" To Government Agencies

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

According to E-commerce Times, IT solutions providers have started to sow the seeds to sell “convergence services” to federal agencies.

“Convergence represents a fundamental shift in the way government is doing and will continue to do business,” says Stan Soloway, president the Professional Services Council (PSC), a group that represents more than 375 companies that provide IT, engineering, logistics and other services to federal agencies. The group defines “convergence” as combining technologies and services to create new solutions and new approaches to produce results.

Partnering with research firm Market Connections, PSC conducted a survey of 224 federal contracting managers and 227 vendor representatives. They were queried regarding as-a-Service and convergence marketing of IT capabilities to government agencies.

According to the release, nearly three-quarters of respondents reported moderate to high impact by convergence, although government respondents were far less familiar with convergence than their counterparts in industry. 

Further, less than one-third of the government agencies report using any type of as-a-Service models presently, and among those that do, software and communications were most common, while platform and training were less common.

Ultimately, the report showed that the chief rewards of using as-a-Service were scalability, rapid deployment of new services, improved performance, and cost effectiveness (paying only for needed services). The top barriers to adoption by government agencies remain security issues, budgetary restrictions, vendor or solution lock-in and unpredictable costs.

According to the report, “The line between technology and services delivery is being blurred. Contractors are increasingly providing products and services as bundled, outcome-based offerings to government.”

The full white paper based on the study is available here.