Consortium Purchasing Program

Send Word Now New Jersey Institute of Technology needed “single sign-on” (SSO) for students, which Send Word Now (SWN) had on its roadmap but wasn’t planning to deliver until later this fall. Relying on the RFP that NJEDge had conducted the prior year, and invoking the purchasing power of the entire consortium we were able to get SWN to revise its product roadmap and deliver SSO this summer so that NJIT and other members could rely on it during their peak new student registration activity this fall.

VMware From an overall consortium purchasing perspective, the major initiative for FY16 was completing the “burn down” of tokens under the ELA, which came in better than forecasted, as well as completing the opt-in for continuation of 30% discounts on VMware support renewals for FY17 and FY18. NJEDge was able to help University Hospital by negotiating with VMware on its behalf for an unlimited agreement that will save the hospitals millions in license and support costs and provide a stable cost structure for its new datacenter over the next five years. NJEDge participated in a VMware convenience contract RFP issued by The Quilt (National Coalition of Regional Networks). This contract was awarded to Carahsoft and locked in significant discounts for at least three years. Since 2013, Carahsoft has been helping to manage our ELA order fulfillment and therefore knows our members and is well-known by our members. Members will continue to be able to access the best available non-ELA discounts on new license purchases (17% off Academic List) because we are mobilizing the purchasing power of NJEDge’s sister networks across the country. Several members also took advantage of our Nutanix and F5 contracts for hyper-converged infrastructure and next generation firewall devices, respectively. These are particularly helpful to public institutions because many of them could not purchase these cutting-edge, emerging technologies without NJEDge’s assistance in setting up the contract vehicles.

Microsoft and Quality Matters Our consortium discounted rates for Microsoft Enrollment for Education Solutions and Quality Matters remain perennial favorites among members. We are seeing nearly universal participation among higher education institutions in these contracts.

We are always monitoring all our contracts to make sure NJEDge continues to offer our members the greatest discounts and most favorable terms.

“Joe Rearden and the team at NJEDge were instrumental in helping NJIT to recently procure a new campus wide mass notification system. As a member of the RFP process, I was pleased with the expertise, professionalism and thoroughness that the NJEDge RFP committee brought to the table. I was even more impressed by Joe’s ability to help bring the weight of our consortium’s purchasing power and RFP process to bear in order to get the vendor to release new features in tune with campus needs and our academic calendar.”