The finalists for WashingtonExec’s Pinnacle Awards were announced Oct. 8, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place virtually Nov. 12.
Next is Cloud Industry Executive of the Year finalist Sandeep Shilawat, vice president of cloud strategy and Data at the Tactical Edge, or D@tE, lead at ManTech International. Here, he talks about achievements in his current role and solving challenges for customers.
Please provide a brief description of why your executive/project/organization is a leader in the selected nomination area(s).
Shilawat brings to his work over 20 years of technical leadership experience in cloud, DevSecOps, data collection and analytics, enterprise applications and solutions. He has been driving digital transformation within ManTech, living up to its motto of Bringing Digital to the Mission.
As the leader of ManTech’s Data at the Tactical Edge technology focus area, Shilawat is the chief architect of the company’s ST3PTM capability, a solution developed by ManTech to securely deliver vital battlefield intelligence and enhance situational awareness for U.S. troops operating in the field. Leveraging advanced artificial intelligence capabilities, ST3PTM is literally revolutionizing the defense sector’s ability to accelerate mission objectives and performance while enhancing the safety of military personnel.
Debuted in 2020, ST3PTM is the latest of Shilawat’s many D@tE accomplishments. Other signature achievements:
- Applying a Microsoft Azure data science process to develop a predictive maintenance capability on one of ManTech’s largest Army programs
- Pioneering the use of AWS Snowball Edge capability to demonstrate ManTech’s prowess in analytics at the tactical edge for a Navy customer
- Using Google Analytics to analyze the Navy’s challenges with its secure supply chain and close quarter contamination in ships and submarines during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Leading the effort to win ManTech a seat on the $95 million U.S. Air Force Cloud Basic Ordering Agreement
- Helping provide guidance and support to over $1 billion in pursuits to the sales and solution architect teams
In his “free time,” Shilawat also provides guidance and support to ManTech’s internal corporate IT team. Most recently, he helped architect a solution to provide better governance and policy enforcement of cloud usage across all of ManTech.
From a workforce enablement standpoint, Shilawat was instrumental in developing the bachelor of science program in cloud computing working in conjunction with ManTech University and ManTech’s education partner, Purdue University Global. He led ManTech’s campaign to upskill company employees, called “100 Certs in 100 Days.” This program was so successful, ultimately more than 300 employees gained cloud certifications in a very short time.
As ManTech’s digital transformation and D@tE subject matter expert, Shilawat is constantly called upon by the executive leadership team to support customer meetings and develop innovative ideas to solve ManTech’s customers’ toughest problems. He has raised the bar for excellence in performance across ManTech.
Describe how this particular executive or project solved a challenge for the customer or mission.
Shilawat was the chief architect of ManTech’s ST3PTM capability that provides secure mobile cloud computing and data at the edge — in even the harshest and most remote environments.
Today’s tactical environments tend to be congested as well as contested, offering only intermittent or low /limited bandwidth connectivity. Warfighters often operate in these environments, and current deployed edge nodes do not have enterprise equivalent connectivity, storage or processing — directly affecting the efficiency of initial point-of-data ingest processing.
Recent advances in hardware and networking technologies provide the opportunity to deploy hybrid cloud infrastructure to bring scalable data analytics and storage to the tactical edge, resulting in discoverable and transportable dense data storage for more immediate awareness of the operational picture and influence for speed to decision.
ManTech’s ST3PTM does just that — giving warfighters access to real-time data in limited bandwidth environments — data at speed that could change the tempo of battle. ST3P improves the speed of decision-making by automating and augmenting data ingest, processing and tagging, ultimately delivering curated “information on demand” to the decision-maker.
Originally developed to support the U.S. Army, ManTech’s ST3P capability has since been demonstrated to other military branches. Further, the AWS Snowball Edge product manager noted that ST3P uses that program in ways far beyond what AWS itself had originally intended.
This is just one example of how Shilawat’s deep expertise is advancing the application of cloud computing in practical ways that protect our service members in the field.