FAA asks for vendor feedback on $10b tech contract

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has opened a commercial information technology contract to potential bidders including hardware and perpetual license software worth up to $10 billion. The FAA warned vendors making pitches for the proposed multi-vendor Strategic Sourcing for the Acquisition of Various Equipment and …

[Potemkine!]

perpetual license software

The same kind of perpetual license that must be mandatory changed to a cloud subscription two years later because of a new software version?

== Bring us Dabbsy back! ==

[Pascal Monett]

I don't get it

So, only off-the-shelf software and no additional development ?

I guess that means that Air Traffic Control software is shrinkwrapped now, and that accounting software is installed pre-configured to your needs. That's nice.

So, all you really need to do is get Office 365 licensed across all your PCs and you're good to go, right ?

Bollocks.

There isn't a company in the world that use Salesforce out of the box (let's not even think about SAP). There is no company using Excel that doesn't have at least half of its business-critical data lying around in Excel files of various complexity. All those files are regularly touched up to respond to changing business decisions - touched up by people who most likely have no training and learned on the spot how to use Excel formulas. If you're using a mainframe, you are developing/maintaining software every day.

Proposing a contract for software with zero development included just means that you're going to have to propose another contract for development, or beg the supplier to "help" you configure and tailor whatever software you bought to your needs.

And that'll likely cost more than if it came along with the procurement contract.

[sketharaman]

Re: I don't get it

In my 25 years' experience of selling software, I've come across many RFPs for COTS / SAAS software. Every one of them has said that the software must be customized to the customer's specific requirements. This FAA one is the only one that has a clause that there will be NO software development. Like you, I also suspect that FAA will come up with another RFP for Software Development. Or it could use the vendor's No Code Platform to carry out the development by itself. I notice that the RFP only says that FAA won't buy Software Development, not that there will be no Software Development at all, which does not preclude inhouse development.

[PM from Hell]

no bespoke code

I Implement COTS packages for a living, no 2 implementation of the same product have been the same yet. So the only client specific items will be System Configuration, workflow config, business rules based processing, document formatting, screen design ooh and legacy interfaces, never forget the interfaces, I imagine there will need to be some ETL to get data out and into the COTS data warehouse (because Data Warehouses never need any logic to normalize and transform data from different sources)

Yup I cant see any problems with that