Commerce’s BEA Posts Procurement Notice for National Cloud Pricing Index

The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released a sole source procurement notice for 451 Research’s one-year subscription to the agency’s Cloud Price Index Service on Dec. 4.

BEA’s price index initiative is a multi-year project to assess potential problems in deflators used to analyze national accounts, according to a 2018 presentation by Senior Research Economist Ana Aizcorbe. With assistance from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, BEA has been seeking out new data sources to construct historical and modern-day price indexes.

For the Cloud Price Index Service, BEA began in 2018 by comparing the IT research and advisory company 451 Research’s Cloud Price Index with academic studies on the topic. 451 Research’s Cloud Price Index analyzes the costs of cloud services to help organizations make strategic decisions around cloud pricing and consumption, according to its website. At the time of Aizcorbe’s presentation, the initiative was just a pilot program.

Now, according to the recent SAM.gov notice, BEA intends to negotiate with 451 Research for the sole, one-year procurement of BEA’s Cloud Price Index Service. Through this project, BEA is exploring data sources that could create new price deflators specifically for the cloud service industry.

BEA clarified that responses to the notice before the Dec. 11 deadline “will be considered solely for the purpose of determining whether to conduct a competitive procurement…This notice of intent is not a request for competitive quotations,” BEA states.

BEA is a statistical agency that researches and analyzes U.S. economic data.