CIA to software vendors: A revolution is coming

I think it might be a bigger deal than you think. It's not just pay structure, it's the fact that the sales cycle, and jobs that would be at stake if someone admitted purchasing multi-million dollar bullshit encourages companies to hire great sales teams, sell crap product, and refuse to innovate.

I'd love to see this take hold and infect other agencies that rely on my tax dollars for ridiculous DOORS licenses, etc.

Isn't that how most larger IT departments already work?

I remember at one job in the past, we would take a regular survey of Microsoft license usage on the network for reporting to said Microsoft.

- an integrator knows the CIA, FBI, and successor to the KGB all need secure software services

- the integrator convinces two secure data centers, one in Reston, VA, and the other in Moscow, to host equivalent infrastructures

- the integrator puts together a suite of services consisting of: Oracle DB (backend store for some services); Microsoft SQL Server (backend store for others); AT&T network connectivity to/from Reston data center; Russian network connectivity to/from Moscow data center; SharePoint document repository; Microsoft Office suite of tools; document-management vendor software managing search, archival, secure role-based access to documents, automatic purging of documents after a given time where applicable; EMC networked storage; image-processing tools with plugin architecture; automated image-processing software from several small specialized shops to recognize military equipment, buildings, insurgent hideouts, etc.; bla bla bla bla

- the integrator puts in measuring tools everywhere to gather usage data: data transmission; storage used; DB activity; #-of-important-items-recognized-during-image-processing-runs; #-of-users-in-system-X; #-of-document-views; etc.

- the integrator applies billing policies for the entire stack, perhaps on a different basis per customer (e.g., CIA/FBI get large-volume discount price list; Syria's secret service gets small-fry high-cost pricing)

- large organizations will likely have (a) a central consulting group acting as a distributor to other departments (along with payments to integrator and income from other departments); (b) other departments that will buy from central consulting organization

- at the end of every month, each department/organization/consultant/integrator either: (a) gets income from their customers and downstream distributors; (b) pays someone upstream for their usage; or (c) both pays and gets some income

- in this case, the integrator (a) pays out to Oracle, Microsoft, EMC, data centers, etc., all on a per-use basis (of course, a flat monthly fee for any particular item is also "per-use" of a month); (b) receives incomes from its direct customers

- given adequate security the actors in this scheme need not ever know directly who their upstream or downstream is beyond a single level