GSA pursuing anti-virus deals
The agency plans to soon expand the SmartBuy program to include McAfee, Sophos and Trend Micro.
The General Services Administration is moving ahead with its effort to establish enterprise software licensing deals for anti-virus products.
The licensing agreements will be part of GSA's SmartBuy program and will allow Cabinet-level agencies to purchase software at negotiated discounted prices. Since mid-October, officials have posted three announcements to FedBizOpps identifying McAfee, Sophos and Trend Micro as companies involved in the effort.
In September, the Defense Department signed an enterprise licensing agreement with Symantec under DOD's Enterprise Software Initiative, and that agreement may also become a SmartBuy deal.
GSA launched SmartBuy, modeled in part on DOD’s initiative, in 2003. Since then, the agency has signed six software makers to be part of the program, negotiating governmentwide licenses for specified products.
The current SmartBuy companies are Manugistics, Oracle, ESRI, Novell, WinZip and ProSight.