GSA pumps up cooperative purchasing

A recent Input Inc. report shows that state and local purchasesunder the General Services Administration's informationtechnology schedules grew to $361.2 million in2007, a marked increase compared to 2006. Inputprojects sales under cooperative purchasing to continue to grow at acompound annual rate of 24.6 percent, surpassing $1 billion by 2012.How are these numbers significant?They certainly are not a large percentage ofthe market: Input reported that theaddressable state and local IT market in2007 was $54.8 billion, meaning thatschedule sales accounted for less than1 percent of the spending. The numbersare not yet large, but they demonstratethat cooperative purchasing is gainingtraction and should be considered part ofany technology manufacturer's public-sectormarket strategy.I emphasize commercial technologymanufacturers because year-over-yearspending was up in hardware, softwareand wireless but decidedly down for ITservices under cooperative purchasing. Tome, this makes a lot of sense. The GSAschedule is a unique contract that incorporatesproduct-specific terms and conditions,a characteristic that means a lot tobuyers and sellers of manufactured technologybut has no relevance to IT servicecontractors. This means GSA has anopportunity to provide value to the extentthat its contracts include license, maintenanceand support terms consistent withhow manufacturers ? and their authorizedrepresentatives ? actually license and supporttheir products.So GSA has an advantage over competingstate cooperative purchasing programs? such as the Western State ContractsAlliance and U.S. Communities ? to theextent that it includes license grants orsimilar product-specific terms in its schedulecontracts.Another feature of schedule contractsthat can lend itself to a company's marketstrategy across the public sector is the dealers'ability to perform sales and transactionprocesses on behalf of a schedule contractor.This lets manufacturers set up programsunder a schedule contract wherebyauthorized dealers ? usually small businesses? can support local customers withoutGSA having to maintain hundreds ofcontracts for a manufacturer's items.A long-term advantage GSA has is therecent Disaster Recovery PurchasingAuthority granted by Congress underSection 833 of the John Warner NationalDefense Act of 2007 authorizing the GSAadministrator to let state and local governmentspurchase products and services fromfederal supply schedules to facilitate recoveryfrom a major disaster; terrorism; ornuclear, biological, chemical or radiologicalattack. According to GSA, more than 60percent of schedule contractors ?11,000 of 18,000 ? across all commodityareas have signed the contract modificationthat includes purchasing bystate, local, tribal and educational entitiesfor this purpose.We know of no recovery purchasesmade via schedules so far, but weunderstand that GSA is developing anoutreach and educational effort targetingstate and local entities. GSA hasbeen rather quiet about cooperativepurchasing and the value ithas provided contractors andbuyers in the past couple ofyears. But based on someconversations at GSA, I'moptimistic that the agency ispreparing to show buyers and sellers howto use the unique contract type and orderingprocedures of schedule contracts at thestate and local levels.Cooperative purchasing is voluntary.It is not a mandate or a requirement. It hasto be a good idea, a shared vision for allinvolved. GSA could do a lot for its contractors? and for buyers at the state and locallevels ? if it developed a few success storiesand case studies illustrating the value of theprogram to all the stakeholders.