Treasury crafts smart software license buy

The Treasury Department plans to use savings from reduced maintenance fees on one contract to expand the contract and help pay for enterprisewide software licensing.Treasury CIO Drew Ladner said the department has forged an agreement with Vignette Corp. of Austin, Texas, which currently provides portal and content management for IRS.gov. Payments for technical support and software upgrades have been creeping up the last three years, approaching 25 percent of the original software license fee, said. “What was proposed was that the maintenance payment stream would be lowered and held constant, and we would use the savings from that to fund the extension of the existing deal so we have an enterprisewide deal,” he said. The deal consolidates Treasury’s purchasing power, reduces duplicative software and challenges the existing software maintenance model, Ladner said.Treasury is putting into action the type of enterprisewide licensing that OMB’s SmartBuy Initiative encourages to negotiate governmentwide software licenses for widely used software, he said. “Choosing the content management software is an example of how we are spending office automation dollars better, and that’s something that not only Treasury but the Office of Management and Budget gets excited about,” Ladner said.