ROCK ISLAND ARSENAL, Illinois (May 21, 2025) - Irene Kremer-Palmer, contracting officer, and Maria Baskovic, contract specialist, from Army Contracting Command-Rock Island's Information Technology Directorate, awarded a 5-year Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity firm-fixed-price requirement with Army-wide impact in January.

This requirement by Program Executive Office - Enterprise, Computer Hardware Enterprise Software and Support, in conjunction with Headquarters, Department of the Army Office of the Chief Information Officer, provides VMware Cloud Foundation Enterprise and VMware Cloud Foundation Edge software packages, related licenses, and associated support.

VMware is critical to the Army because this software allows multiple virtual machines to run on a single physical server, reducing hardware costs and increasing efficiency. This software increases productivity via improved speed, uptime/availability, accessibility, resource utilization, as well as enhances security and simplifies backups/recovery. Additionally, the contract provides users with access to 24x7 technical support, software version updates and upgrades, security vulnerability fixes, software patching and software license inventory management solutions.

Roughly 90% of the Army utilizes VMware's virtualization software, thus, an enterprise license agreement was pursued to consolidate and leverage the Army's purchasing power to achieve the best price for VMware licenses.

As both Headquarters Department of the Army's Office of the Chief of Information Officer and Program Executive Office - Enterprise, Computer Hardware Enterprise Software and Support, were stakeholders, the effort took a lot of coordination. The team had both internal preparatory meetings, which took considerable collaboration from all stakeholders, including legal and pricing, to ensure the government was unified, and then the external negotiation meetings.

Baskovic said this acquisition and negotiation process was unique in that negotiations included participation by both the manufacturer and vendor, in addition to the customers and contracting team. "The manufacturer's involvement helped the team understand the new product's features and how they differ from our previous purchases," said Baskovic.

Kremer-Palmer stated that the months-long daily negotiation calls with the vendor, Carahsoft, and the OEM, Broadcom, to go over the terms and conditions was new to her but was also very interesting.

"It was a large group that worked together from both the government side as well as the contractor side. That was a new dynamic, and it was great that we could do it via Teams because there were quite a few people involved in the daily calls. We could share documents and go through line-by-line, which was a challenging experience, but you learn so much," said Kremer-Palmer.

Baskovic and Kremer-Palmer also believed that the negotiations went well because the subject matter experts could aid the collective team real-time, both with help from the technical experts to understand what they were actually negotiating and the impact, as well as pricing and legal expertise during the conversations.

"It was a team effort, and we could not have gotten through it without everyone involved," said Kremer-Palmer.

Source: U.S.Army