First published in The Mandarin 9 February 2026

The Digital Transformation Agency has released the strategic review of the whole of Australian government single seller arrangements (SSAs). The review, by IT consultancy SolsticeIT, found the arrangements delivered the government “significant value for money” – more than $1.6 billion.

$1.6bn is savings? No!

To be fair, DTA doesn’t claim $1.6b in savings – the report says $1.6b in discounts – but it’s hard to avoid the impression they’d like readers (and ministers) to blur the distinction.

The “Strategic review of the whole of Australian Government Single Seller Arrangements” covers the whole‑of‑government contracts for the big platforms – Microsoft, Amazon, SAP and others. Agencies are expected to use them so Finance and DTA can aggregate demand and negotiate better pricing. It’s a sensible idea, and it does deliver benefits. But the model comes with real consequences, and those are not well dealt with in the review.

I like to believe departments seek to be accurate rather than manipulative. Here, if they’re not doing the manipulating, they’re being manipulated – not much of a win either way for DTA.

Confirmation bias is baked in

The weaknesses are structural. The review assumes SSAs are the right answer and focuses on how to make them better. The baseline – “what if we didn’t have SSAs?” – is never really tested, and alternative models aren’t explored. That matters, because you can only talk about savings if you can estimate a credible baseline. Perhaps that’s why the report sticks to “discounts” rather than savings. Flattering the outcome but weakening the analysis.

Even then, the “discount” concept is shaky.

In this industry, vendors use a list price – for seats, compute, storage and so on. No one, and I mean no one, ever pays list. It’s just a reference point for negotiation. A large, commercially capable organisation might expect 70–80% off list (or more). A smaller agency with less commercial depth might see 50–60%.

DTA’s value is the extra discount it can secure above what agencies could have achieved themselves, less the costs DTA imposes. With modest assumptions, the real economic benefit is likely in the hundreds of millions – say $250–600m – not $1.6b. That’s still material, but it’s a very different story to the headline.

We don’t actually know the spend

In practice, we can’t calculate the savings, or even the actual spend.

The report itself acknowledges that AusTender data doesn’t align with SSA usage: only some entities must report, many contracts go through resellers, and reporting is often under the “wrong” SON or panel. Agencies don’t consistently capture SSA usage in their own financial or contract management systems.

Vendors, on the other hand, have very good data on government.

The result: DTA can’t definitively say how valuable the SSAs have been, or what the true whole‑of‑government position is. The report is admirably honest about this in the body – just not in the headline.

This isn’t just a transparency issue for the public. It makes it very hard for Finance or DTA to properly manage category spend or negotiate genuinely strategic deals. You can’t run a serious portfolio if the suppliers know far more about your buying than you do.

Uneven benefits, reduced leverage

Savings aren’t equal across the board.

Large agencies, with scale and better‑resourced procurement functions, should be able to reach the higher end of vendor discount curves on their own. What they lose under an SSA is leverage. A significant component of the “deal value” is now captured centrally and can’t easily be traded for things that matter locally: scope, schedule, service levels, responsiveness, maintenance, training, transition and so on.

In strategic technology deals, breaking the commercial story into siloed components is usually a mistake. Small agencies clearly benefit from aggregation; large agencies may well be giving something up. The review does not seriously contemplate alternative ways of supporting smaller entities without imposing the same model on everyone.

This is a policy trade-off, not an inevitability.

Lock-in and lock-out

The review downplays technology and vendor lock‑in by arguing that agencies were already committed to these platforms before the SSAs; DTA is just providing a contracting framework. On the surface that’s true. But SSAs also hard‑wire the path of least resistance: buy more of what you already have.

If we care about competition and innovation, that matters. It’s already hard to justify the business case for moving off a deeply embedded platform; it gets even harder when the easiest commercial path is pre‑baked with the incumbent.

On the other side of the coin is lock‑out. You can’t join an SSA without already having a large slice of government business; you can’t easily build that position without being inside the SSA tent. That Catch‑22 bites mid‑tier and domestic vendors, such as Atlassian, TechnologyOne, Canva, Zoho, Workday, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, Wisetech and many others.

It’s not that no new innovation will develop – obviously it will – but the playing field is tilted away from exactly the kind of firms Australia says it wants to grow.

Assumed extension, not genuine refresh

There is also an implicit assumption that SSAs will simply roll forward. Incumbents are safe and are rarely subjected to real competitive pressure at the whole‑of‑government level. The report refers to reviews and exit plans, but the underlying bias is toward extension rather than genuinely re‑testing the market or re‑thinking the structure.

SSAs need to be a market intervention and a tool, not standing infrastructure.

Where this leaves us

SSAs do deliver value and serve a purpose, particularly for smaller agencies. But they come with risks and weaknesses that need to be acknowledged:

• they encourage complacency about competition and alternatives
• they lock in incumbent technologies and lock out challengers
• their true value proposition is poorly articulated and can’t be accurately quantified with current data and reporting.

The review itself is useful and contains some honest admissions, but it doesn’t really support the simplicity of the headline. If we’re going to keep using SSAs – and we probably are – we need a more sophisticated conversation about what they’re really doing to the market, what they’re really worth, and how best to leverage them for both tactical outcomes for agencies and strategic outcomes for Australian industry.

Image: Photo by Abdulkadir Emiroğlu on Unsplash