WT 360: The market from all angles

Big mergers that essentially create new companies require a lot of work to harmonize all of the people, processes and resources into something more cohesive across the organization. Jeremy Wensinger joined V2X as chief executive in June to lead this new phase of what he calls “optimization” now that all the integration activities stemming from the 2022 merger that made the company are done. In thi...

One of the government market’s most-anticipated transactions closed on Sept. 30 when what we can call “Old Amentum” joined forces with Jacobs’ federal-facing units. This episode sees Steve Arnette, chief operating officer at what we can now call “New Amentum,” take our Ross Wilkers through all that went into putting this larger company together and where everyone wants to go from here. Underpinnin...

Jerry McGinn, executive director of the Baroni Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University, shares the findings of a new report that identifies areas of concern and offers advice for improvement across the defense industrial base. Some of the key findings that McGinn discusses with Editor Nick Wakeman include the importance of leadership, government and industry collaboration, and...

Bryce Technology has been named to the Washington Technology Fast 50 list for four consecutive years, climbing to No. 11 in 2024. For this episode, Bryce Tech's founder and CEO Carissa Bryce Christensen shares the secrets behind her company's rapid growth and success in the federal market. Christensen discusses Bryce's strategic approach to building a scalable business, focusing the pipeline on th...

Companies can get distracted a lot when carrying out their strategy and vision, which often times leaves them vulnerable to losing market share to competitors and unexpected turns of events. Everything starts with strategic planning and that is also where the conversation begins for this episode featuring James Calver, a partner at fractional executive services provider TechCXO and multiple-time C...

It is not just appearances that suggest a robust government technology market, in fact there are numbers and patterns we can point to here in week number four of federal fiscal year 2025. Where agencies are putting most of their technology budget dollars to work is the starting point for this episode featuring John Caucis and James Wichert, public sector analysts at the market intelligence firm Te...

Understandably so, the names of global tech giants are often at the center of the conversation surrounding how the U.S. government is putting its CHIPS Act funding to work through grants and other financial incentives . But the Commerce Department wants many more companies to be a part of the push to restore U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing. Larry Sher, a government contracts attorne...

Boeing’s current difficult period is well-documented and acknowledged by its new CEO Kelly Ortberg, who joined in August to lead the turnaround effort. Audrey Decker essentially functions as Team GovExec’s Boeing correspondent in her role as Air Force and Space Force reporter for our partner publication Defense One. For this episode, Audrey breaks down the ongoing turmoil in Boeing’s defense and s...

Artificial intelligence is not just a technology that government contractors provide their customers, but also is becoming a bigger piece of internal operations. Kim Koster, vice president of product marketing at Unanet, joins WT Editor Nick Wakeman for this episode to discuss how and where contractors are adopting AI in their own operations as found in the newest edition of her company's GAUGE re...

Frustration builds up when things go wrong in the world of government acquisition and that feeling is true on both sides: the customer and contractor alike. Adam Rentschler and his partners started Valid Eval in 2011 to help agencies make better evaluations at scale. All throughout this episode, the latter two words of that sentence come up frequently in the conversation between Rentschler and our...

Many of the ingredients for creating more connective tissues between business, government and society are already in place even with so much commentary and conversation around what may be lacking on that front. NobleReach Foundation launched in 2022 to be at the forefront of making more of those links happen. In this episode, NobleReach’s chief executive Arun Gupta describes how the nonprofit look...

Next to satellite imagery, drones have been the major technological focal point for the war in Ukraine and U.S. Army leaders have been looking to learn quickly from how the systems are being used there. Sam Skove , who covers the Army and Marine Corps for our partner publication Defense One, has seen much of this action first-hand from visits to bases in the U.S. where the drones are tested and in...

Dennis Kelly's public sector career journey began in the Navy and has continued as a senior executive for multiple contractors, which he led through periods of growth to be acquired by larger companies. Now as CEO of Tyto Athene, Kelly brings that experience of building and scaling multiple businesses in a dynamic market. In this episode, Kelly describes his approach for doing that in a conversati...

Raft's first six years of being in business are a lot like what many startups encounter, in that much of the growth has been bootstrapped and in very select corners of the market landscape it works in. Now Raft is in a place where Shubhi Mishra, who started the software engineering company in 2018, believes there is much more greenfield in front of it. That led her to start looking for an investor...

Much of the world shut down on July 19 after cybersecurity company CrowdStrike distributed a faulty software update that essentially rendered 8.5 million Microsoft Windows computers useless. David DiMolfetta , who covers cybersecurity at our partner publication NextGovFCW, led the bulk of GovExec's coverage of the aftermath even though the outage was not technically a cyber situation. But all that...

Generative artificial intelligence is only the newest example of how federal agencies have different comfort levels with adopting new technologies and in this instance, intelligence agencies appear to be bolder in charting their path forward. Frank Konkel, editor-in-chief for GovExec's publications including us, wrote a deep dive article earlier this month that includes his conversations with some...

Just about every conversation about technology across the federal landscape seems to begin and end with generative artificial intelligence, a tool that spurs fears and hopes all at the same time. Edward Graham has a front-row seat to many of those conversations in his role at our sibling publication Nextgov/FCW, where he reports on national security technologies and policies. For this episode, Edw...

Byron Bright described KBR as a "big, large science, technology and engineering company" to open a presentation for investors in May on the vision and blueprint for the entire business. His description to Wall Street is also the starting point for this episode, where Bright explains how Company No. 17 on our 2024 Top 100 tailors that idea to U.S. government work and sheds further light on the worl...

GovCIO's starting point for its journey in the market might as well be the acquisition of Salient CRGT in 2020 that greatly multiplied both key measurements of scale: revenue base and workforce. Joe Cormier, both chief operating officer and chief financial officer at GovCIO, explains in this episode how the technology integrator has become what it is today as a result of that transaction. For cont...

As one of the federal government's primary carriers, Lumen Technologies also takes on the mantle of layering the latest innovations on top of the core network to make it more complete and well-rounded. Jason Schulman, national vice president of federal government sales at Lumen Technologies, explains in this episode how the company works with agencies to make that happen regardless of where they a...

Even with this year's Top 100 rankings out for all to see, sometimes it's never too early to start looking at next year's when we have certainty over how two companies will feature on it. For this second in a two-part episode, Nick and Ross pick up where they left off in part one by highlighting how the complex merger of Amentum with Jacobs' government services businesses will affect the 2025 rank...

Edition number 31 of the Washington Technology Top 100 rankings is now live for all to use as a resource for more than just the numbers behind the federal market's largest technology and services contractors. This latest episode of WT 360 has Nick and Ross start their talking through the companies and numbers that feature on the ranking, but particularly what they tell us about the government mark...

Initial public offerings in the government market are a rare event, so it was natural to focus much attention on Telos Corp.'s IPO in the fall of 2020 and where the company wanted to go next. Telos' chief executive John Wood spoke to us shortly after the completion of that IPO and returns for this episode to provide an update on the security technology company's execution since then. A significant...

It is the law of the land that says federal agencies cannot simply discard any of the data they take in, no matter how much they already have and regardless of whether it is digital or physical. Melissa Carson, vice president and general manager of Iron Mountain's government solutions business, starts out this episode with facts and figures to help quantify the volume challenge agencies have with...

Dave Zolet, CEO of the newly-formed Astrion, has set an aggressive goal to double its annual revenue to around $1.5 billion in three years. That’s the needed size and scale to be a formidable mid-tier player today and fill a sweet spot in the market, Zolet says in this episode. The 2,800-employee company was created through a pair of acquisitions by private equity firm Brightstar Capital. Zolet is...