Top 25 Execs to Watch in 2020

John Avalos, Chief Operating Officer, SOS International

John Avalos joined SOS International in 2017 to lead day-to-day operations. In 2019 alone, he led SOSi’s identification, operational due diligence and integration of its most recent acquisition of Vykin Corp. in July.

“The addition significantly strengthens our company’s IT and intelligence capabilities, particularly in cloud development and supporting command and control and intelligence systems,” Avalos said. “It marked the fourth significant SOSi acquisition in four years.”

The firm is directed toward the defense and aerospace services industry, and works with all the major departments that impact defense and intelligence to provide analysis, technology, language services, logistics and training.

Under Avalos’ COO leadership, SOSi completed an overall corporate restructuring in 2019 that will strengthen its customer relationships and better position it to leverage its capabilities across markets.

“We expanded our global footprint into the Pacific, Southwest Asia and Europe — and established a new line of business in the Middle East,” Avalos said. “About a third of our employees now work overseas.”

And the company competed alongside the biggest contractors in the business to earn a position on SIA 3, the primary contract vehicle for providing intelligence analysis support to Defense Department warfighters, planners and policy professionals worldwide.

“It was a massive win for our business,” Avalos said. “Not only did we enter a new tier of competition but the award also firmly establishes SOSi as a trusted provider of intelligence services.”

And among other awards, SOSi was named GovCon 2019 Contractor of the Year in the $300 million and above category by the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce and Professional Services Council.

“Perhaps no honor reflected our maturity as an organization better,” Avalos said.

Why Watch:

SOSi is integrating several disparate capabilities developed internally with those gained through corporate acquisitions. For example, it merged several of its artificial intelligence, software development and cloud capabilities into a single technology development and innovation group to deliver new solutions for federal customers.

The firm is also working closely with its federal customers to integrate leading-edge open-source intelligence and deep and dark web exploitation capabilities.

“We have incredible system integration and software development capabilities that have helped to field the most sophisticated implementation of PeopleSoft Global Pay currently in production worldwide,” Avalos said.

And SOSi is leveraging its language and technology expertise to pioneer new AI-enabled machine translation and automatic speech recognition solutions for the government market.

“We are building discriminators in areas where both our expertise and customer needs align,” Avalos added.

In 2020, SOSi will continue to have an aggressive acquisition and investment mindset, while prioritizing integrating new technologies and discriminators into its portfolio.

“I would also like to explore potential strategic partnerships with tech companies that are currently operating both in and outside the federal market,” Avalos said.