Tracking the Spend: Education Department Spent Nearly $4M on Top IT Buys in Year’s First Half

The state education department made 205 purchases of IT goods from Jan. 1-June 30 and spent nearly $4 million on the five costliest.

The California Department of Education (CDE) spent exactly $3,856,979.55 on its five most expensive buys of IT goods, all of which were purchases, not contracts. These numbers represent a slight decrease from a total of 226 such purchases from Jan. 1-June 30, 2022 — but a rise in the value of those five costliest purchases. During the first half of 2022, CDE spent just $2,636,883.67 on its five costliest IT goods buys.

With rounding, here are CDE’s five costliest purchases of IT goods through June, based on data in the State Contracting and Procurement Registration System:

• $1.1 million with NWN Solutions Corp. for Cisco C9500-24Y4C-A, Catalyst 9500 24x1/10/25G and 4-port 40/100G products. CDE made the purchase June 11.
• $1 million with Crayon Software Experts LLC for Microsoft Azure products. The department made the purchase May 3.
• $795,000 with Kovarus Inc. for ServiceNow learning credits for online class use. (In September 2020, Kovarus was acquired by AHEAD.) CDE made the purchase June 26.
• $564,000 with National Student Clearinghouse for a one-year subscription renewal of its StudentTracker product. CDE made the purchase May 30.
• $355,000 with SLED IT Solutions Inc. for Elasticsearch services. CDE made the purchase June 22.
  

The periodic reports of spending on IT goods and services by agencies and departments in state government are compiled by Industry Insider — California as a way of highlighting procurements and trends.