The Public Sector: Understanding a Transforming Market

DLT recently participated in the XChange Public Sector conference which brought together leading analysts to focus on opportunities in the public sector community, including new products, services and solutions, as well as insight from leading industry speakers. The opening session, presented by speaker William Eggers, focused on the impact of changing federal and state IT initiatives on public sector integrators and vendors. These vendors have been challenged to develop programs to meet the evolving needs of the government customers. Eggers discussed his research findings on why some big government initiatives succeed while others fail, and drove home the key point that successful programs have elements that can be replicated. These elements act as a type of map to “systemic barriers to success” that are built into challenging programs. One program mandate that can’t be avoided is the migration to cloud computing. The federal government has a major interest in making that switch, even though the adoption process is slow-going. DLT’s CTO Van Ristau participated in a panel discussion about this during the Federal Cloud Session: Drilling Down into the Federal Market. The discussion aimed to provide insight into cloud computing initiatives that emphasize a push to reduce infrastructure costs, speed application development, reduce complexity, and shrink the energy and real estate footprint of federal IT activities. The movement to the cloud is motivated mostly by the model’s efficiency, solving budget issues and mitigating wasteful spending. Van also explained why the embrace of cloud will continue to be a slow progression, even with the right motivation.  “The 25-Point reform can’t be implemented overnight,” he said. “The problem is that the federal government is not monolithic. Agencies have a lot of latitude, and always have had a lot of room to do things at their own pace and in their own way.” Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, who left the White House after two and a half years, published The 25-Point IT Management Reform Plan in December 2010 and was driving the federal cloud computing revolution. Attendees and solutions providers gave their thoughts on his departure throughout the conference. Surprise and disappointment were the reigning positions, with a feeling that people move on from projects too quickly causing government plans to take twice as long as they did 15 years ago. But the show must go on, and XChange Public Sector brought together “the best-of-the-best thought leaders” in the industry to show that opportunity is still knocking for solutions providers.