“The General Services Administration is trying, once again, to remove the complexities that agencies face when buying cloud services.
This has been a long-standing goal across multiple administrations and multiple attempts that have struggled to gain traction across government…
Sonny Hashmi, the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service in the GSA, said he believes Ascend will be different than previous attempts to create big cloud procurement vehicles…
‘At this point, we’re being very deliberate about making sure that there is an actual need on the other side of this. Adoption is going to happen not just because it’s going to be a forcing function, but because there’s actually a need that we’re solving. If we’re not, if it turns out that we’re behind and agencies don’t have a need, then I would rather actually not do this,’ he said. ‘While we’re excited about this program, ultimately, its job is to solve a problem and help agencies to deliver on mission. If there’s a better way or a different way to solve for the problems that we are facing, we’re happy to change tactics on it.’…
More broadly, Hashmi said, Ascend is trying to bring the ‘next level of maturity’ to agencies as they adopt cloud services.
He said Ascend will let agencies buy cloud services ‘by the drink’ or under a consumption based model. It will let GSA on-ramp new cloud service providers as they become available as well as contract holders bring innovation to the federal sector as required and necessary…” Read the full article here.
Source: Why GSA believes its new cloud services contract is different than past efforts – By Jason Miller, May 30, 2022. Federal News Network.
