FY22 Cloud Computing Price Index SOW.pdf

Statement of Work Data purchase for Cloud Computing Price Indexes

Section 1 – Introduction/Background

Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), as the nation’s accountant and one of the world’s leading statistical agencies, collects source data, conducts research and analysis, develops and implements estimation methodologies and disseminates statistics to the public. In this role, BEA collects source data from many specific sectors of the economy.

A major initiative in BEAs Strategic Plan is to explore data sources that would allow the construction of new price deflators for the cloud service industry to be used in the accounts.

Section 2 – Statement of Objectives

It is important that BEA continually strives to develop new and improved source data to develop improved deflators used in the national accounts to obtain estimates of real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that are used to obtain a large and growing segment in the national accounts. Innovation in cloud technology poses special challenges in constructing those deflators. Cloud computing is a rapidly growing service industry -about 40% of small businesses currently use cloud technology and that share is expected to double over the next 5 years. While the nominal expenditures associated with the provision of cloud computing services do not pose new measurement problems, the price indexes that one might use to measure inflation for this segment of business services are problematic.

The objective of this procurement is to obtain Cloud Price Index services. BEA requires systematically collected real-world pricing data from the market place to calculate weighted average prices for a variety of cloud products and services. BEA will use these data to construct price indexes for cloud computing services for deflation purposes.