Page 70 - FCW, March/April 2018
P. 70

SEWP V
     CDW•G DELIVERS
                                     SEWP V HITS ITS STRIDE
Building on its solid foundation, this contract vehicle continues to improve.
  WO YEARS INTO the latest iteration of the venerable federal technology
acquisition contract, SEWP V is truly hitting its stride. The many participants are now quite familiar with the vendors, scope, ordering, and buying processes and other changes in the contract. What’s probably surprised most of them
is the ambition that still pervades the now 25-year-old Government- Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) procurement vehicle.
Awarded in May 2015, the 10- year, $30 billion SEWP V (Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement  fth iteration) contract still focuses on selling fundamental IT products such as desktop computers, servers, and peripheral equipment. It
also includes tablets, networking equipment, and more importantly, security solutions.
However, SEWP V also increasingly provides for the services agencies need to set up, con gure, and integrate those products into
their current infrastructure. Product-based services such as maintenance, warranty, product training, site planning, installation and initial implementation and product-based engineering services are all available as part of the scope of SEWP V. They can also be delivered on their own; not as part of any product purchase.
“Product-based solutions are certainly within the scope of SEWP V,” says Carroll Genovese, SEWP program manager for CDW•G. “As a Value-Added IT Solutions provider we often provide those kinds of solutions and services for our customer.”
With SEWP’s history as a products contract, the services part of SEWP V is not as well known. SEWP has added even more services into
the new contract, says Joanne Woytek, the NASA SEWP program manager, but it’s taken a while to get that message over to users.
“It has taken a couple of years to educate customers on being able to obtain product-based services — and not just products — through SEWP,” she says.
SO FAR, SO GOOD
So far, SEWP V shows all the signs
of being a roaring success. In FY2016, it booked $3.1 billion from some 29,000 new orders; with order modi cations adding another $700 million. For FY2017, those numbers rose to $3.8 billion from 32,000 orders; with another $900 million from modi cations.
That year-over-year 20 percent increase in dollar amounts from just a 10 percent increase in the number of transactions shows agencies are using SEWP V for more consolidated and strategic purchasing, says Woytek. The  rst quarter of FY2018
showed that trend to be continuing. The goal now is to provide the
tools, concepts, reports, and functionality to help agency leaders with more complete insight and understanding of their agency’s IT purchases. Two items in particular have contributed
to having more CIOs and other acquisition leaders view SEWP V as a strategic tool, says Woytek. They can get speci c reports on their own agency’s IT purchases, and there’s now an “agency catalog concept” that lets an agency set aside a piece of the huge overall SEWP catalog that includes just those products and services that meet agency requirements.
If an agency wants to standardize on a certain set of printers, for example, they can de ne the speci cations they need. Then the SEWP program of ce will provide
an interface to the SEWP catalog that shows just the printers that meet those requirements.
“Regardless of overall numbers and usage tied to a speci c initiative,” says Woytek, “the focus on strategic solutions has fed
                      









































































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