Inside guide to growing your public sector sales
August 22, 2019 Leave a comment
By Tara Franzonello, Contracts Manager
FITARA, also known as the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act, was enacted by Congress in December 2014 with an aim to reform government’s management and acquisition of IT. Although agencies have made progress over the last 5 years, there remain significant challenges in working toward FITARA compliance.
What does this mean for technology providers? Opportunity! Read more of this post
August 7, 2018 Leave a comment
By Tom O’Keefe, consultant
Big Data and artificial intelligence are top of mind at NASA this summer. The agency has always collected, sorted, and stored a massive amount of data and made that data available to the public. Now, it’s looking to leverage big data tools to better understand more of the huge volumes of information it has at its fingertips
The focus is on increasing efficiency wherever possible, and it’s this approach you should keep in mind when you’re talking to NASA this year. Here’s what NASA is going to be working on, so make sure you’re tailoring your message appropriately:
May 9, 2017 Leave a comment
By Chris Wiedemann, consultant
Last Friday, as the rain pounded the Washington, D.C. region, my colleague, Tom O’Keefe, and I huddled in a recording studio to chat with Mark Amtower on federal IT trends for his Amtower Off-Center show.
The 45-minute segment was posted here yesterday. Here are highlights of what we think the IT industry needs to know now that there’s a budget in place for the rest of the year.
April 27, 2017 1 Comment
By Kevin Shaker and Mark Wisinger, senior analysts
The internet of things today is what cloud was five to six years ago. A lot of people are interested in it and buying IT solutions that comprise IoT in disparate ways.
This is an exciting time for the IT industry because companies can influence how the market is shaped since it’s still so new. IoT is not a discrete technology but rather a wrapper encompassing many different technologies, and these solutions are ramping up in a big way through the growing amount of sensors and data.
The big picture projection is that $6 trillion will be spent on devices and IoT software across all industries in the next five years, according to Business Insider’s Business Intelligence research. We predict the federal IoT addressable market will hit $3 billion in FY18, up from $2.5 billion spent in FY16.
February 14, 2017 Leave a comment
By Tom O’Keefe, consultant
The next few years could be interesting for NASA, especially if the Trump administration tries to take aim at its climate observation work. But that won’t necessarily stop the space agency from continuing to innovate, embrace new technologies and continue its move toward the cloud.
In fact, while there have been recent challenges within the agency, particularly concerning cybersecurity, expect NASA to continue its role as a standard-bearer for new technologies within the federal government.
So what does that mean for IT vendors? Well to understand how to appeal to NASA, it’s important to focus on how to better enable its science and engineering mission. Here are some areas to focus on:
May 3, 2016 Leave a comment
By Lloyd McCoy Jr., DOD Manager
If you attended our recent Cloud Briefing & G
overnment Panel, you likely heard a recurring message from the federal leaders who spoke: They need help from industry.
Moving to the cloud has been a bigger challenge than expected as summed up by Office of the DOD CIO cloud lead Robert Vietmeyer, who spoke on our government panel: “This stuff is hard. Leadership is bought into your marketing pitch,” he told attendees, largely representing cloud providers. “We all want better, faster, cheaper. We just found it’s more difficult to get from where we are today to where we all want to be.”
February 18, 2014 Leave a comment
by Tomas O’Keefe, Senior Analyst
A recent NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) report has criticized the agency’s handling of its major end-user computing services contract, the Agency Consolidated End-User Services (ACES) effort. The ACES contract is one of several efforts meant to consolidate NASA’s IT acquisitions, collectively known as NASA’s IT Infrastructure Integration Program (I3P). The OIG report has found that NASA lacked the institutional controls necessary to manage an enterprise IT initiative and calls in to question many of the other I3P contracts as well.
Two main reasons why NASA’s programs have been troubled include:
Government Sales Insider 