GSA's agenda for resellers focuses on service pricing transparency

In every conversation about how the government is looking to recalibrate its relationship with industry, questions about the role of technology product resellers and value-added resellers seem to inevitably come up.

Contracts with those companies came under scrutiny during the first year of this second Trump administration, while the General Services Administration is moving on its OneGov procurement initiative to have more direct relationships with brand name tech companies.

Laura Stanton, acting commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, said during a Wednesday webinar that the complex nature of technology procurement means the agency will always want resellers to be a part of the ecosystem.

OneGov and other pressure points on resellers are coupled with how fast the overall commercial tech marketplace moves to begin with. Stanton pointed out that agencies also tend to bundle their purchases of products with ancillary services like cloud and licensing support.

“This complexity has really increased the importance of having those knowledgeable partners who understand the commercial technology and the unique requirements of the federal marketplace,” Stanton said in the webinar hosted by George Mason University’s Baroni Center for Government Contracting. “Resellers, (and) particularly value-added resellers, help bridge that gap.”

Stanton cited solution design, tech integration, license management, security requirements and compliance obligations as examples of where VARs support agencies.

GSA’s primary goals in starting up OneGov and subsequently entering into agreements with software-centric companies include establishing transparent baselines for not only pricing, but terms and conditions that every agency can lean on.

Stanton said that when looking out to the next three-to-five years, GSA will push to have more visibility into total lifecycle costs for technology and that includes services provided by VARs.

But while price is important as volume discounts are inherent to OneGov, Stanton said GSA is also looking to send clear demand signals to the original equipment manufacturers and then determine the services needed.

“Right now, it's just very challenging to differentiate if we have everything together and with a single price,” Stanton said.

In January, GSA issued a request for information to the reseller ecosystem that asked for details on pricing practices and markup percentages as part of the agency’s examination of how these companies work with OEMs.

The agency also sought to get a deeper understanding on factors that shape markups such as volume, product category, support levels and business size. This RFI focused predominantly on hardware purchases, while OneGov has mostly centered around pacts with software companies.

GSA received 130 responses across the federal acquisition community to the RFI, Stanton said. Much of the responses from industry centered around expertise and services wrapped around the products, as well as compliance and documentation work that is inherent to federal acquisition.

Industry respondents also weighed in on how the government defines total value and showed some “willingness to separate the product pricing from the value-added services” to support GSA’s transparency push, Stanton said.

As with any change to how the government operates, Stanton pointed to the workforce and laid out what FAS is doing now to help them adapt to the new paradigm.

“We're looking at how we better align our Schedule practices with these commercial standards: how to get the acquisition workforce more information and guidance over how to analyze, how to price, how to acquire both the services and the products, and how the agency buyers can better evaluate those value-added services,” she said.