On Daily Scoop Podcast, Angela Styles Talks Software Licenses and Federal Contracting

Akin Gump government contracts partner Angela Styles returned to The Daily Scoop podcast to discuss a bill making its way through the Senate that would have federal agencies consolidate software licenses and share more information about software purchases, a change that could have a big impact on major government software and cloud service providers and on the federal contracting community.

Styles, a former Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy within the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, said that, in 2002, she had had a similar idea and initial conversations with a software company about a license across the federal government for software. She believes consolidated licenses makes “lots of sense” and finds it “shocking” that the federal government still hasn’t used its buying power to make it happen.

She also discussed the challenges of implementing this potential congressional mandate, particularly for small businesses, and assessing its impact and extent, as well as the tension between the federal government using its massed buying power to get the best prices for software and the federal government using this buying power to spread out its buying among small businesses and sustain the industrial base as broadly as possible.

To hear the full episode, click here.