Procurement professionals from the Internal Revenue Service, in an effort to set up an efficient mechanism for obtaining software licenses, visited several commercial companies like Oracle and Microsoft in order to determine what business practices they use. Discussions centered on commercial practices and cost-effective means of acquiring software licenses. In each case, the government learned that enterprise-wide software licenses made the most sense. By doing this level of market research, IRS was able to reduce the per-user cost by 80 percent or more. The initiative is expected to serve as a model for future enterprise software initiatives in the Department.