LAS VEGAS — Google is offering the entire federal government — and each federal agency — a 71% discount off current pricing on its Workspace software suite through Sept. 30 in an agreement reached with the General Services Administration effective April 10.
The significant pricing discount is available on the Multiple Awards Schedule and based on the volume of the entire federal government rather than traditional agency-by-agency pricing, in line with recent major changes to GSA’s MAS program and President Trump’s executive order centralizing government procurement within the agency.
“Google will now approach the federal government as one unified customer — and President Trump’s GSA is working hard on this collaboration to turn that recognition into real savings to secure lower prices for best-in-class technology across all federal agencies,” GSA Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian said in a statement. “By working closely with industry leaders like Google, we will continue to lower the cost of IT while providing improved experiences for the American taxpayers and the federal government.”
Google estimates the discounted Google Workspace software “could help federal agencies potentially save up to $2 billion over the next three years with government-wide adoption,” according to a blog post authored by Tony Orlando, general manager of specialty sales for Google Public Sector.
“Government agencies rely on IT providers to provide secure, compliant, and efficient technology to help complete their vital missions,” Orlando said. “At the same time, cost-savings and productivity are taking center stage. These priorities — lower cost with better security and productivity — may seem at odds, but with the right cloud provider, they don’t have to be.”
Google Workspace is a communication and collaboration platform that includes applications like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Meet and more. The suite also includes some of Google’s most popular commercial AI and generative AI tools, including Gemini and NotebookLM, at no additional cost. Google Workspace has achieved FedRAMP High authorization, meaning government users dealing with the most sensitive unclassified data can securely use those tools to, for example, transcribe meeting notes or compose emails on their behalf.
While Google Workspace is used by several hundred thousand government users, including personnel at GSA, the Energy Department, Air Force Research Laboratory and others, Microsoft’s 365 suite has long been the dominant productivity software across government.
But executives at Google Public Sector, which Google launched in 2022 to build its government business, are bullish on Workspace and their growing array of easy-to-use AI tools. The company’s focus on efficient and effective use of technology align well with early efforts at GSA and with the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, which Trump initially set up to modernize federal technology but has also played a large role in cutting the federal workforce.
“In my 25 years of serving public sector, all the different software companies I’ve worked for in the past, I have never felt so relevant as at this moment in time, in our ability to serve government in the AI era,” Brent Mitchell, vice president of go-to-market at Google Public Sector, told Nextgov/FCW in Las Vegas, Nevada at the Google Cloud NEXT event.
“Every time we engage [with the government], it’s immense pressure on efficiency and optimization. They want to take cost and manual process out of the equation,” Mitchell said. “We’re not coming to the table with any legacy baggage. We don’t have on-prem software. We don’t have bloated support renewals. We are an agile innovation engine that is non-disruptive.”
