“The ‘desktop’ and current operating systems will be quaint metaphors . . .”

The advent of Everything as a Service (EaaS) will revolutionize the work of proposal professionals.  For even the oldest practitioners, the task has remained the same – until now.

How soon will the change to EaaS happen?

According to Fortune Magazine, Government had a fundamental change of philosophy in 2016, and federal users are now moving to the cloud “faster than private corporations.”  A CTO told nothing but the truth when he said, “The ‘desktop’ and current operating systems will be quaint metaphors the same way we look back at 8-track tapes, phones with dials, [and] typewriters.”

Numbers provided by Gartner show the timing and magnitude of the change to the as a service (aaS) model.  Although these statistics are worldwide, they depict trends where federal numbers are even higher than those shown below:

  1. More than $1 trillion in IT spending will be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to cloud during the next five years.
  2. From 2016 – 2020, the percentages of the market shift from premise systems to cloud are are follows:
  3. Business Process Outsourcing (BPaaS) – 43%
  4. Application Software (SaaS) – 37%
  5. Application Infrastructure Software (PaaS) – 10%
  6. System Infrastructure (IaaS) – 17%

Changes in proposal content

As the system development paradigm slides toward obsolescence, technology proposal professionals are now required to learn how prepare a new kind of proposal in response to EaaS solicitations.

With the Government becoming a fast adopter, things will move at high speed.  This means, the primary task before us is to learn enough about the new EaaS solutions to successfully propose them.

Where we see a radical change is in the proposal content.  We are now proposing to provide an immediate outcome rather than a developmental process.  Key variables include the following:

  1. Business system functionality – how well does our EaaS solution addresses customer needs?
  2. Service delivery standards – How do we learn enough about features such as visualization, configuration, data analytics, bandwidth, responsiveness, availability, etc. to prepare a better proposal than the competitors?
  3. Transition plan – from the old to the new way of doing business
  4. Cybersecurity / mobile security plan
  5. Pricing – The change to a monthly billing model has several pricing problems to be solved. For example, how long a contract must the vendor have to recoup his capital costs
  6. Warranty – traditional warranty goes away and the new guarantee revolves around performance metrics.

An added challenge for the proposal group is this:  When you are answering a Statement of Objectives (SOO), how do you know if your solution meets the customer needs?  In order to have a low-risk answer your architect may have to do modelling and simulation.  The proposed solution then needs to be demonstrated to the customer as part of the shaping process.