Federal Tech Podcast: for innovators, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who want to increase reach and improve brand awareness

One of the most practical applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is to assist in network observability. The big move to Zero Trust is predicated on the ability to have a thorough understanding of network assets. This is a significant issue for federal information technology. We have legacy systems, shadow IT, and a deluge of data in addition to the confusion that a hybrid network can bring....

In 1848 they found gold at Sutter's Mill in California. According to the CEO of Cohesity, data is the new gold. Today, we sit down with David Kushner from Cohesity to unpack what this "gold" reference means for federal technology leaders. This has always been the case. Today, we see cheap storage, fast Internet, and Generative AI producing an overwhelming amount of data sets. The challenge is how...

We are at the point where Artificial Intelligence is splitting into several capabilities. These include Generative, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, Predictive, and Deep Learning to name a few. Today, we sit down with Melisa Bardhi from Excella and look at one aspect of AI, Generative AI, and examine how it can be used responsibly for federal applications. In a short 25 minutes, she c...

Sometimes, we must look at literature to get an understanding of the current situation for federal GWAC contractors. Let us look back to Charles Dickens with, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Here is the scenario: your company spends a ton of time and money to get a spot on a GWAC contract. never to win any work. All your hopes and dreams of increasing business have been crus...

We are in a whirlwind of change. Data is pouring into federal agencies. A recent report indicated that data was growing at 25% a year; cloud usage at a rate of 61%; and Software as A Service an astounding 200%. Oh, did I forget to mention that Generative AI is also increasing data exploding? It is one thing to worry about data from John's Doughnuts, and quite another to worry about sensitive milit...

Sometimes, the most important impact of technology can be behind the curtains. Today, we will not focus on AI Deep Fakes and AI language translation, but on the impact AI on software development. Terry Miller from Karsun begins the interview with the basics of software development: collecting user stories. Traditionally, a systems analyst would interview several users to see how a software system...

Ep. 150 Can a platform provide a path to safe AI for federal technology? About every reader knows that ServiceNow is a large company that helps the federal government with managing large systems. Today, Dr. Raj Iyer answers the question – is ServiceNow keeping up with AI to help reduce cost and improve delivery for massive federal systems? Dr. Iyer is in a unique position because of his years of e...

Everyone has seen AI with articles and even deep fake videos. No doubt it is dazzling, great for a conversation at a picnic with friends. The question is . . . can you put AI in work boots? Vishwas Lele has a novel idea: combine the best of AI with the best of proposal writing. Further, his innovation can be applied to an environment where data must be held securely. Yes, we are talking about prop...

Federal technology has paralleled the commercial world in its expansion to millions of endpoints. On one hand, this means better information from something like an intrusion sensor. On the other hand, it means the attack surface has just expanded exponentially. It has come to a point where there has been a normalization of breaches. Unfortunately, this does not mean one can neglect protecting your...

After hundreds of interviews with tech innovators I have concluded they are all trying to accomplish the same thing: tell how they can help get the word out that they may have a slice of the solution for federal information technology. One of the best ways to "get the word out" is through a community of interest. During the interview today, Derek Weeks details his success in forming a community ar...

The federal government has a myriad of technological challenges: legacy systems, Zero Trust, and even maintaining existing equipment! Most companies who work in that environment solve problems from a traditional office, or, even more comfortably, a home office. Unfortunately, life at the tactical edge is not that easy. Today, we dive into the tactical edge network with Sumner Lee, the CEO of a com...

Cybersecurity threats are like fashion; wait a few years and they come back in style. The Internet was designed to take a series of digits and resolve them to a website address. This was deemed the Domain Name Service, or DNS. In 1996, we saw the first malicious actor flooding a system with an attack. This was called a Distributed Denial of Service Attack, or DDOS. Over the years new methods of at...

Appian Corporation is a 25-year-old technology company that focuses on improving process automation for large organizations. Once a year they have an annual conference for developers and partners. They rotate this meeting all over the world, we are lucky enough to have them meet in Washington DC where we have the chance to sit down with one of Appian's co-founders, Michael Beckley. During the inte...

In connecting with some new listeners, I learned that some have never sold to the federal government and listened to the podcast to see how other companies manage to work with federal agencies in reaching agency goals. Well, it seems time to pull back with a bonus episode on how to sell technology to the federal government. To accomplish this task, I looked for a person with twenty years of experi...

Not all threats to the United States are discussed in English. That simple concept is well known in the intelligence community; however, making an obvious statement and being able to understand the nuances of a foreign language is a different matter. Today's interview is with John Weaver, the Chief Strategy Officer for a company called Babel Street. The company began in 2009 with its name recogniz...

Artificial Intelligence is at the phase where federal and commercial technology leaders are amazed by novel model architectures. Each one can perform a function like data preprocessing, feature extraction, or prediction. The demonstrations are impressive; today we look at the data behind the dazzle. Adam Kowalski from proximal has spent years helping organizations follow a data-centric AI approach...

Cheap storage and fast Internet have made data collection cheap and fast. It is no wonder that we have federal agencies that are drowning in data. Some will argue that the federal government is the largest collector of data in the world. That may be a fantastic fun fact that will dazzle your neighbors, but how is that data being used to move forward the goals of the agency? Today, we sat down with...

In 2021 the federal leaders recognized a problem with citizen experience on federal websites. As a result, Executive Order 14058 was released dedicated to improving citizen services for federal technology. However, a 2023 McKinsey & Company report states the average score for federal services is only 31%. Justin Fessler from Yext appears on the Federal Tech Podcast to offer some insights on how to...

The Federal Trade Commission recently estimated that nationwide fraud tops ten billion dollars. Most of the efforts to stop this abuse start with identification. However, the federal response has been weak.  Today, we have a former federal leader and current Vice President and Head of Public Sector Strategy for Society on the podcast, Jordan Burris. He opens with the obvious – if malicious actors...

ChatGPT has overwhelmed the headlines in the past few months. It has brought the concept of artificial intelligence to the forefront of many discussions. Like everybody talking about swimming in the Olympics and then forgetting about it for four years. Well, Primer.ai has been deeply involved in artificial intelligence since its inception seven years ago. It did not start with creating a bot for a...

In most of my interviews, I sit down with a company and talk about innovation in solving federal technology goals. Today, a twist. Sonny Hashmi was at the center of the battle for improving federal technology. For the past three years, he was the Commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at the GSA. This has given him a unique perspective on what the bottlenecks are in streamlining federal t...

Everyone reading this has seen the movie Top Gun with Tom Cruise and heard the classic phrase, "The Need for Speed."   Well, a desire for speed is not limited to Naval Aviators. People in federal technology may not have call signs but need to optimize communication speed between data centers. If you were to stand in front of a whiteboard with a bunch of enterprise architects, they would dazzle you...

An American poet once wrote about reaching a fork in the road and he considered which path to take.    When one attempts to consider branching logic and automation in complex technical systems, there is a lot of consideration given to which path to take. There may be lessons to be learned from Robert Frost's 25-line masterpiece.      Today's discussion is with Thomas Kinsella, Chief Customer Offic...

Today we sit down with Susan Kidd and Valinder Mangat and discuss FedRAMP. Some will argue that FedRAMP is an unruly thirteen-year-old. Although FedRAMP has authorized over three hundred public service cloud providers, there is much work to be done. For example Valinder Mangat opens the discussion by noting that we have approximately five hundred applications in the pipeline. We have a situation w...

If you were to take a class in Data Management 101, you would walk into the classroom on the first day and be bombarded with terms like data lake, data warehouse, and data mart. Phew. Where to begin? Let us jump to a federal agency. They are being deluged with data from low code no code, big application platforms, and let us not forget legacy applications that are not in the cloud. How to manage t...