How to Sell Your Products to the Army in FY15

by Stephanie Meloni, Senior Analyst

Despite declining budgets, the Army remains one of the largest IT organizations in the world, and it still has the largest IT budget of all the services. Army’s FY15 budget request represents about a 10 percent reduction in funding from FY14 enacted levels. Many of the IT initiatives the Army is implementing to modernize their systems and networks deal with consolidation, simplification, and standardization – and this accounts for some of the reduced funding levels, since there aren’t as many costly legacy systems to maintain. So, for the COTS community, this reduction in funding isn’t all bad news, especially if your products can help the government operate more efficiently. In FY15, many of the IT modernization efforts will focus on making systems interoperable as well.

Each component of the Army needs information technology products, but not all agencies and offices offer the same opportunity to COTS vendors. Having an understanding of the structure of the Army and which organizations are involved with products procurement, from requirements gatherers, to functional end users, to acquisition offices, is the key to getting your product in front of the right offices. Business development and salespeople need to know which offices are responsible for which IT requirements, as well as the messaging that will resonate with them.

Join us on August 21 for an in-depth look at how the Army’s structure connects to its requirements and how to identify the correct technology insertions points. During the Webinar I’ll speak to these initiatives, as well as the Army’s IT priorities for FY15 including:

• Partnerships with DISA and the Air Force for Shared Services and the Joint Information Environment
• How the Army plans to simplify networks via its Roadmap for Tactical Network Modernization
• Consolidation of legacy business systems and increased importance of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems
• Cybersecurity needed throughout all phases of a product’s lifecycle

I’ll also speak to which programs and initiatives offer the greatest opportunities for COTS sales. FY15 should offer strong prospects in the areas of cybersecurity, telecommunications, applications, and data integration and information sharing.