The Defense Department signed a three-year, joint enterprise license agreement (JELA) with CDW-G for Adobe products. The $40.5 million agreement leverages the buying power of 2.6 million DoD personnel in the Air Force, Army and Defense Information Systems Agency.

This is the second JELA the Pentagon has entered into and is similar to the first such agreement it made in December 2012 for Microsoft products. The goal of the JELA is to reduce costs and improve collaboration, interoperability, document services and publishing capabilities. It also supports the combatant command headquarters for which the Air Force and Army are executive agents.

The new JELA allows the three DoD components to access the latest Adobe technologies, including Acrobat Pro and Experience Manager Document Services, as well as number of Creative Cloud subscriptions.

“The JELA is a best practice approach to answering enterprise software requirements for the DoD and joint operations,” said Lt. Gen. Michael Basla, chief of information dominance and chief information officer at the Air Force. “The agreement with Adobe not only produces substantial savings of $16.6 million over the next three years, but also allows us to move beyond electronic versions of forms and begin transforming business processes using online, fillable ‘smart’ forms tied to databases.”

Army Deputy CIO Michael Krieger said the agreement improved the standard license terms and conditions, leading to a “true joint information environment.” The Army will soon begin converting all of its forms to Portable Document Format (PDF).

“DISA is in discussions with other vendors to pursue additional JELAs in partnership with the military services,” said DISA CIO Dave Bennett. “These agreements will save the department money and provide users with the tools they need to complete their missions.”

DISA is the lead organization on the CDW-G contract.

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