- Pentagon issues Oracle with first ever direct-award contract
- Nearly $7 billion in existing Oracle licensing is consolidated into a single contract vehicle
- The contract is projected to deliver $441 million in savings by unifying technology purchases
The US Department of War (DoW) has awarded Oracle with a near-$7 billion contract as part of the Arsenal of Freedom to supply the Department with enterprise software and services.
The contract is one of the biggest Enterprise Software Agreements (ESA) ever issued by the Department, and is the first-ever, direct award contract. It is projected to deliver at least $441 million in savings by “consolidating fragmented, one-off information technology purchases into a unified, single award contract.”
The contract unifies all of Oracles’ previous software, services and licenses under a single vehicle, and will support the DoW, the Coast Guard and the Intelligence Community with consolidated licensing for vital software that the Department says will accelerate modernization and reduce “costly redundancies”.
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Oracle awarded historic contract
The contract does not amount to new funding for Oracle, but is the total amount that Oracle receives across its existing contracts with the DoW under this new contract vehicle. The contract removes existing vertical purchasing channels between departments, and places procurement under a single entity that spans the US security and intelligence community.
This isn’t the first contract the DoW has awarded in an attempt to consolidate procurement between multiple branches. In May of this year, the Department awarded Dell and Microsoft with contracts worth $9.7 billion to provide unified software licensing across Microsoft 365, cloud subscriptions and on-premises licensing to prevent licensing sprawl and cut costs across the US defense community.
“For the Department of the Navy, this agreement supports faster delivery of secure, scalable software from the shore enterprise to the tactical edge for our Navy and Marine Corps teams,” said Barry Tanner, Performing the Duties of the Department of the Navy Chief Information Officer.
“Reducing fragmented procurement and advancing enterprise standardization will strengthen interoperability, reduce cybersecurity risk, and help us focus resources on resilient capabilities that can scale, integrate, and endure in contested conditions.”
Following the start of his second term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to centralize federal IT procurement under the General Services Administration (GSA) as part of efforts by the now defunct Department of Government Efficiency to reduce what it determined as unnecessary government spending.
Since financial auditing was introduced for the DoW in 2018, it has failed to pass a full department-wide evaluation.
Trump’s executive order prompted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to implement new measures on how the Pentagon negotiates licensing in order to receive the “most favorable rates on software and cloud services, so the DoD pays no more for IT services than any other enterprise in America.”
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benedict.collins@futurenet.com (Benedict Collins)
