DoD awards $970M blanket purchase agreement to Carahsoft, Broadcom

The Defense Information Systems Agency, an IT support agency within the U.S. Department of Defense, has awarded Reston-based Carahsoft, an IT services and consulting provider, and California-based software and semiconductor producer Broadcom a five-year, $970 million blanket purchase agreement to streamline and consolidate software contracts.

The DoD’s blanket purchase agreement for Broadcom’s VMware, a provider of multicloud services and virtualization software, is held by Carahsoft, an authorized Broadcom distributor, according to an announcement the companies made March 24.

The agreement provides uniform pricing and cost transparency for private cloud infrastructure, security and other Broadcom tools for multiple DoD agencies, including DISA, the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Space Force.

Additionally, the agreement streamlines acquisition for the VMware Cloud Foundation, or VCF, platform, “reducing costs and consolidating procurement for private cloud infrastructure, tactical edge operations, zero trust security and modern application development under a single, unified contract,” the release says.

The VCF platform is a unified private cloud system that combines “the agility and scalability of the public cloud with the security, performance, architectural control and the total cost of ownership benefits of an on-premises environment,” according to the release.

The agreement with Carahsoft and Broadcom also provides government agencies with access to professional services and technical training platforms to help accelerate the deployment of VMware software. It also makes building and maintaining Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) for Broadcom offerings a priority. These are designed to simplify implementation of the VCF platform for federal agencies within the DoD.

Adopting the VCF platform lowers the cost of ownership compared to three-tier infrastructure, which organizes applications into three computing tiers, and native public cloud, an approach to building applications using cloud technologies, primarily by reducing hardware, facilities, and IT payroll expenses, according to an analysis by the VCF Cloud Economics team.

“This agreement underscores Carahsoft’s and our reseller partners’ commitment to delivering secure, scalable and cost-effective solutions to government agencies,” Chris Hiebert, sales director for the VMware team at Carahsoft, said in the release.