GitHub Enterprise available governmentwide with new partnership

Federal agencies now have an easier path to procuring GitHub’s enterprise offering.

The open source software development tool has partnered with DLT Solutions, a reseller of IT products and services, to offer GitHub Enterprise to agencies on DLT’s governmentwide contracting vehicles.

According to the two companies, GitHub Enterprise will be immediately available via DLT, which holds prime contracts on NASA’s Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V and the National Institutes of Health’s CIO-CS, with more likely to come.

While a number of federal agencies, like NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, have already bought GitHub Enterprise directly from the company, Elizabeth Pemmerl, head of GitHub’s public sector team, said this should eliminate the onerous paperwork it takes to get the tool running in an agency’s systems.

“For GitHub, it’s a fantastic opportunity to have access via DLT to a number of governmentwide schedules that agencies use frequently and are interested to use to procure GitHub,” Pemmerl told FedScoop. This is the first time GitHub has engaged a reseller like DLT, which will make GitHub more widely and easily available, choosing to do so after receiving a tremendous amount of interest from federal agencies, she said.

But why would agencies want to use GitHub Enterprise when the standard version of GitHub is so popular — there are more than 100 repositories and thousands of federal users — and already offers so much? Pemmerl points to the ability for larger enterprises to integrate the software into their operating environment and comply with federal regulations.

“The most important distinction is that ability for the agency to install GitHub Enterprise on their own infrastructure and control that experience — it lives behind their firewall,” and they have the ability to integrate it into their FedRAMP-secure clouds, she said. The enterprise product also offers some deeper features tailored to larger teams, like authentication, auditing and reporting tools.

And many agencies tend to use the standard and enterprise versions of GitHub.

“What we’ve seen most frequently are agencies using both GitHub.com — where they maintain their open source projects for collaboration by folks at the agency, contractors and the open source world at large — and GitHub Enterprise … for internal collaboration purposes,” Pemmerl said.

Beyond making an open source product available to more agencies, GitHub government evangelist Ben Balter said DLT’s offering of products from open source software companies like GitHub and Red Hat gives agencies a “one-stop shop to modernize their IT development workflows.”

So no matter what offerings an agency might pick, Balter said, “It’s really making it easier for agencies that really want to reimagine and modernize their software development workflows.”