Purchasing and Offering of Cloud Software Services by a Central Procurement Agency: A Case Study

The cooperative purchasing model has since long been used by government entities to obtain better purchase conditions through the power of aggregation. In particular, the âPiggypackâ option which consists in bridging a contract from one entity to another in an ethical way has been almost globally generalized since 2005. Although cloud software services are natively designed for convergent needs, its apparent attractiveness has to be precisely qualified, especially in the cases where this "Piggyback" option is contractually defined. In this paper, we study the specific problems that can be experienced in the definition process of cloud software services when implementing cooperative procurement. In particular, we show the particular importance of the scalability of the contractually defined SLA themselves in this context. We propose some best practices. One is based on the use of meta-SLA and sub-SLA concepts. It is illustrated by an application on an innovative governmental cloud software services implementation program that was already described before. This leads to a better understanding of the role played by central procurement agencies in the definition of cloud software services.