Palm Beach County, Florida

Palm Beach County is the third-most-populous county in Florida — roughly 1.5–1.6 million residents across West Palm Beach and 39 municipalities — and one of the largest counties by land area east of the Mississippi. County government operates under a County Administrator (CEO model) reporting to an elected seven-member Board of County Commissioners, with a workforce of about 7,100.

Central IT is delivered by Information Systems Services (ISS), now publicly branded the Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), which serves most departments under the Board plus some constitutional officers. The shop runs the largest county-owned fiber-optic network in Florida, a unified-communications platform for roughly 10,000 users, an inventory of 350+ in-house applications, Oracle databases, enterprise GIS, data-center colocation and hosting, and a 24x7 help desk. Its stated highest priorities are cybersecurity, broadband/connectivity, and centralized IT-security oversight.

For a Dell SLG seller, Palm Beach is a large, infrastructure-rich county account in transition — a new County Administrator (Joseph Abruzzo, mid-2025) and a CIO succession (longtime CIO Archie Satchell retired January 2026; deputy now acting) — where the buying motion runs through the county Purchasing Department and cooperative contracts rather than the state's central vehicle.

Palm Beach County adopted a $9.6B total budget for FY2026 (Oct 1, 2025–Sep 30, 2026). The General Fund operating portion is about $2.5B, balanced at a countywide rate of 4.5000 mills — held flat from FY2025 — generating roughly $1.5B in ad valorem taxes (about $112M more than the prior year). IT capital costs are borne directly by the Board of County Commissioners rather than allocated through the ISS cost plan, so technology spend is split between ISS's recovered operating costs and Board-funded capital.

• The county weighed cuts and new revenue options against the FY2026 budget; flat millage on rising values still expands the revenue base, but net-new IT spend competes against other priorities — co-op pricing and ROI framing matter.
• Capital IT costs are fully borne by the Board of County Commissioners and are not part of the ISS cost-allocation plan — map Board-funded technology capital separately from the ISS operating/cost-recovery line.
• A precise ISS/OTI department operating budget was not confirmed from a current public source; anchor IT-specific spend against the adopted budget book rather than a single quoted figure.
• FY2027 outlook is under acute fiscal pressure: County Administrator Joseph Abruzzo presented a proposed FY2027 budget in June 2026 with roughly $35M in cuts after the Commission directed a flat-or-lower millage, and county leaders warn a November 2026 statewide ballot measure raising the homestead exemption (to $150K in 2027, higher thereafter) could force the largest department cuts in county history — a discretionary-budget squeeze that will tighten net-new IT capital and sharpen ROI/co-op-pricing framing. Figures were still moving as of June 2026 (max-millage and property-value estimates due July 2026; final adoption September 2026) — treat as evolving.

Palm Beach buys through its own Purchasing Department, not the state's central vehicle. Confirm two things first: Dell's standing on the cooperative contracts the county leans on, and registration in the county's Vendor Self Service (VSS) system so you can see and respond to solicitations.