Telos, Air Force strike SmartBuy deal

The Defense Department late last week officially extended its enterprise software agreement with Telos Corp. for two of its titles to the rest of the federal government, offering discounts between 5 percent and 40 percent off of the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service schedule.

Previously, DOD's deal with the Ashburn, Va., company for its Xacta Information Assurance Manager, Automated Message Handling System and security consulting services was open only to the military services, the Coast Guard and intelligence agencies. But now under the SmartBuy program, every agency can purchase the software at the discounts, said Susan Kirkland, Air Force software product manager and ESI team lead.

"The expansion of that agreement provides the same products, terms and conditions and pricing discounts to federal customers," Kirkland added.

The agreement is for 15 months, and officials expect agencies to buy about $56 million worth of software during that period. Kirkland said no new contracts with Telos are imminent, but all further new and renewal contracts would be expected to go through this contract.

The Xacta IA Manager provides automated enterprise security process automation and establishes a centralized security management platform that helps agencies perform compliance assessments, continuous risk and compliance management and security process enforcement.

Xacta AMHS lets users manage classified and unclassified defense messages while providing users with control over large amounts of messaging information. It also lets agencies create, coordinate, release, archive and search massive volumes of messages.

Air Force's deal with Telos is the seventh SmartBuy deal for the government. GSA and DOD already have agreements in place with Oracle, which ranks No. 2 on the government's top 25 list of software that agencies buy; ESRI Inc. of Redlands, Calif., No. 4; Novell Inc., No. 10; Prosight Inc. of Portland, Ore., No. 20; Manugistics Group Inc. of Rockville, Md.; and Eyak Technology LLC of Anchorage, Alaska, for WinZip compression software.

Last fall, GSA announced imminent SmartBuy deals with antivirus software vendors, including McAfee Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., and Symantec Corp. of Cupertino, Calif. But no final deal has yet been reached.

Telos ranks No. 70 on Washington Technology's 2005 Top 100 list.

Jason Miller is assistant managing editor of Washington Technology's sister publication, Government Computer News.