A 20-year government contracting veteran, Seth Moore spent 17 years with Lockheed Martin before joining T-Rex Solutions as chief financial officer. He quickly moved into the chief operating officer role, and today serves as president and CEO.
A provider of next generation IT solutions to the federal government, T-Rex focuses on the transition to the cloud — helping agencies to get there, and to make the most of their cloud investment. While the firm has a strong history in the defense sector, it presently is working to grow its federal footprint. Its strategy: to offer a more comprehensive solution set.
“You hear about a lot of federal agencies moving to the cloud and historically, if you look into the details, typically that’s been done on an application or system-by-system basis,” Moore said. “An agency may move a single system from an on-premise environment to a cloud environment. What’s different about us is we’ve done that at an enterprise level, at a really large scale.”
Recently, for example, T-Rex helped the U.S. Census Bureau make an enterprise move to the cloud in support of the 2020 national headcount.
“You think about the Census, it’s at a scale that’s really second to none,” Moore said. “They’re in the middle of collecting responses from over 330 million Americans, 140 million households. There are going to be over 430,000 enumerators out in the field collecting responses using handheld devices.”
T-Rex helped to modernize the IT infrastructure in support of that effort.
“We’ve done this now at a size and a scale that few others have, and we’ve done it with mission-critical applications,” Moore said.
Now, the company is looking to leverage that success as it seeks to broaden its engagements across government. One potential avenue of growth: Mentor-Protege Joint Ventures.
“That’s where we as a large business mentor a small business, and through the [Small Business Administration’s] program we’re able to create a joint venture,” Moore said. “We’ve leveraged that capability to enter into agreements with companies that need our mentorship, and that allows us to compete on the set-aside work.”
The firm is also looking at some potential strategic acquisitions as a way to broaden its base.
At the same time, T-Rex remains focused on the cloud as an area with significant potential. While many agencies already have transitioned to cloud-based computing, changes in the commercial cloud landscape create new opportunities for GovCons.
“There are more commercial cloud options today,” Moore said. “AWS has had a big market share for a number of years, but now, you’re seeing Azure make more of a play and even Google Cloud and Oracle’s Cloud, and IBM has a cloud offering.” For GovCons, “it gives you more options. One of the products or capabilities that we’ve developed is a cloud selector, an automated way of putting different variables about an application into an assessment, and that will tell you which is the best cloud for that application.”
Tools like this help T-Rex to align more specifically with agency needs.
“Some customers may be more price sensitive, some may be more outcomes-based, and based on that set of variables, one cloud may be better suited than another,” Moore said.
The cloud selector reflects the growing maturity of federal thinking about its networking and compute environments.
“The first policy was called cloud first, which basically said you want to put everything in the cloud,” Moore said. “The next evolution of that was called cloud smart, which acknowledged that there are some applications that are better suited for an on-premise environment. We’ve created an objective way to measure which cloud, or which landing zone, is most appropriate for the requirements of the individual customer or for the attributes of the application that’s being moved.”
To keep in touch with those ever-changing requirements, even as COVID-driven physical separations continue, T-Rex has been looking for creative ways to engage with customers and the internal team.
“We are doing things now like happy hours, or we’ll do a lunch where everybody gets on a Teams meeting with video and they just have lunch together,” Moore said. “We’re creating environments where people can engage with one another and not talk about work. That’s part of the way you build those long-term relationships.”
Those same relationships help to drive Moore’s personal sense of satisfaction. As a long-time GovCon professional, he says helping his clients to meet mission is always personally rewarding.
“With the Census, for example, this is really one of the underpinnings of our democracy,” he said. “This is how we draw district lines for the House of Representatives, it’s how trillions of dollars of federal funding are allocated. It’s critically important, and to be a part of making that successful is exciting.”