Today’s insight into the federal IT market comes from Randy Fuerst of Oceus Networks. Fuerst was appointed as the new COO of Oceus earlier this month, reported by WashingtonExec.
Randy Fuerst: I believe that the government must make a right turn and drive onto the commercial roadmap to take advantage of rapidly advancing communications technologies. At every government/industry conference that I have attended over the past 6 months, the overarching theme from leadership is “Do more with less!” Because of major budget reductions that are we are facing, communications programs will be challenged to change even faster in the same way that government computing programs did several years ago – leveraging proven, low-risk COTS (Commercial-off-the-Shelf) technology, versus creating custom government communications products.
In the past, government used to develop their own computing systems until they realized they could have greater computing capabilities, faster to market and at a lower cost, by leveraging the substantial innovation investments made each year by private industry in creating world class COTS computing products. Similarly, we are seeing the same thing now with wireless communications innovations, particularly 4G LTE cellular communications. Innovations in the commercial communications market have far outpaced legacy government communications programs. Consumers , including both government and military personnel, in their personal lives have become accustomed to using the latest emerging mobile communications capabilities — think smart phones, tablets, streaming real-time video, cloud services, chat, test messages, you tube, twitter, etc .
I think that the combination of government employee expectations and expertise, with ever increasing demands on agency productivity and efficiency, will drive our government leaders to collaborate more closely with world class technology companies – this time for mobile broadband communications solutions — to leverage the literally billions of dollars of private industry investment that can enable them to deliver even more effectively and efficiently on their missions. The Army is already shifting their acquisition process to be more agile through use of innovative platforms like the Network Integration Experiment (NIE) which allows industry to demonstrate the best in technology innovations to fulfill identified capability gaps on the tactical edge. Hopefully, through the lessons learned from agile acquisition processes like the NIE, we can vastly improve the way our Government acquires its future products and services. Vast savings in government R&D costs can be realized by following the commercial road map for wideband wireless capabilities.