Efforts to adopt enterprise software are ramping up across the Defense Department as officials caution the operational environment will soon be too complex for the armed forces to succeed without more shared technology.

The Defense Information Systems Agency is working on four new multiyear contracts, known as Joint Enterprise License Agreements, David White, the JELA program manager at DISA, said at a recent AFCEA DC event on acquisition reform outside Washington. He signaled a break is likely ahead for the key initiative to consolidate the military’s core commercial software and cybersecurity products into cheaper packages that anyone can use.

“Hopefully I’m going to stop at eight [agreements], because there’s only one me,” White quipped.

White said last summer he wanted seven JELAs in place within three years. At the time, DISA had created four of the agreements and was working on a fifth, Breaking Defense reported. A year later, the agency has added another three contracts to that queue, for eight in total.

The first four agreements involve Broadcom, Adobe, Cisco and Palo Alto Networks. DISA spokesperson Dawn Bonsell declined to provide further details about which companies are next in line, how much their contracts could be worth or a potential timeline for setting them up.

White previously said hitting his goal could be a stretch, since each JELA takes about 18 months to set up.

Enterprise software licenses let thousands of employees use everyday workplace software like Microsoft 365 or Adobe Acrobat at a lower cost per person than an individual subscription. They streamline the process of routine tasks like editing and sharing documents, whether in a contracting office or at a command hub in the field, where time is of the essence.

Organizations across DoD typically buy software on their own, leading to a hodgepodge of products and licenses across — and within — the military services and defense agencies. But that approach adds up. 

For instance, the Army spends $2.8 billion each year on software licenses spanning 120 contracts in seven offices, according to Adam Nucci, who oversees Army IT funding.

Enterprise licenses offer a strategic advantage, Nucci said in a keynote at the AFCEA DC event, and makes software use more predictable and consistent for the firms that provide it.

But panelists noted that DoD’s acquisition teams need to get better at describing what the government wants from industry, and put more skin in the game by judging their job performance on whether a contract they wrote was successful.

“We’ve had to teach our contracting shops … to get into what is really outcome-based contracting,” Nucci said.

Embracing joint software also requires the services to overcome their silos and work together. In December, White said, he began convening officials from across DoD and industry to discuss ways to align their procurement plans. Facilitating those meetings is a new role for DISA.

“We don’t want to put agreements together that we’re saying [are] enterprise agreements, and it’s only leveraged by one component,” White said. “In order to get all the components involved, they need to be in from the beginning.”

Nucci said he also meets monthly with counterparts in the Navy and Air Force to chart a path forward for seamless software.

He challenged industry to mull how software-defined networking — managing a computer network through software rather than directly programming each device on the network to connect — could help the military solve its longstanding struggle to link scores of military vehicles, sensors, weapons and more that are each controlled by separate systems and often weren’t designed to share data.

Nucci predicts the military has three to five years to streamline its approach before “our environments … get really dynamic.”

“We are going to get to a point, folks, where it’s not going to be a Navy contract, an Army contract,” Nucci said. “We’re probably working with DISA, and we’ll have to be working it up to the department level. That’s sort of where we’re heading next.”

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