Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, described the announcement as a development that is “long overdue. It should be no surprise that, collectively, the US government is either the largest or close to the largest customer of most of the software mega-vendors, which include Oracle. For decades, GSA pricelists have demonstrated discount levels for agencies barely below the retail price in many cases.”
He said, “a flat 75% discount on perpetual license software is a good start; however, it is hard to compare to the private sector, where discounts can go much higher than this baseline. The positive impact of this may be more symbolic, however, as the rate of traditional license purchases has declined precipitously, as workloads continue to migrate to the cloud.”
“Oracle does provide a discount structure for its OCI cloud services based on levels of spend; however, it is not clear if the GSA agreement improves upon these programmatic levels or simply codifies them through November,” Bickley added. “While there is no mention of Oracle Java, one has to wonder if government-wide discounts were applied here as well, and if so, by agency or in taking all of the US federal government as a whole.”
