Contractors Almanac

All Opinions expressed are my own. Once upon a time, back when the Federal Acquisition Regulation still felt mildly comprehensible, we had a relatively tidy definition of cloud computing. NIST Special Publication 800-145 provided us with a framework:  Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).  It wasn’t perfect, but at least it gave contracting officers, vendors, and program managers a shared language. Then Congress got creative. Thanks to Section 809 of the FY24 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Department of Defense now has a new procurement experiment: the  Anything-as-a-Service (AaaS) Pilot Program . The name alone is a red flag. Anything? Really? And yes, they mean it. In early May 2025, the Office of the Director for Defense Pricing, Contracting, and Acquisition Policy (DPCAP) released guidance expanding the definition of AaaS far beyond its cloud roots. Under this new model, a wide arr...

All Opinions are my own. For OEMs, it’s a windfall. For resellers, a reckoning. For advisors, an opening. On April 16, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14271,  “Ensuring Commercial, Cost-Effective Solutions in Federal Contracts.”  The order didn’t just encourage agencies to prioritize commercial technology—it made it federal policy. Within 60 days, agencies were directed to audit their open solicitations and justify any planned acquisition that veered away from commercially available, off-the-shelf solutions. It was the strongest public-sector signal in over a decade that government-unique technology buying needed to stop being the default. Two weeks later, on April 29, 2025, the General Services Administration launched the OneGov Strategy, giving the executive order form and function. Where EO 14271 articulated policy, OneGov operationalized it. It provided agencies and vendors with a playbook: leverage GSA as the centralized buyer, reduce acquisition duplication,...