Paul Smith
CEO, Rancher Government Solutions
This year was a year like no other in the public sector space, said Paul Smith. Customers have indicated budgets are a challenge, and the budgeting process is made harder when appropriations aren’t done in a timely manner.
Artificial intelligence also presents both a challenge and an opportunity as customers try to figure out what good is and what bad could look like. Plus, there’s a compute paradigm shift happening that has driven some customer agnosticism about when and where computing happens ⏤ whether at the edge or in the cloud, across multiple cloud service providers and in terms of volume.
“Paul has always modeled servant leadership and his brand of leadership has produced results wherever he’s gone,” said retired Maj. Gen. Dale Meyerrose, who serves on the RGS board of directors. “I think that’s why we’re seeing the RGS team carve out its niche and compete with some of the more established players. It’s been exciting to watch, and the best is yet to come.”
Why Watch
Smith and his team are working to make sure as that agnosticism continues, RGS maintains its position as an elite partner to agencies for container orchestration and management, security, Linux and Open Source.
RGS is specifically designed to address the security and operational needs of the U.S. government and military, as it relates to application modernization, containers and Kubernetes. The company understands the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters at scale and taking that message to the market is something it’s doing aggressively.
“We have a tremendous team and, I think, a strong work environment where people understand our mission and our vision but also have the latitude to act on it with their individual and God-given talents,” Smith said. “We’re proud of what we do together and for customers, and for me, the best part is being able to leave a conversation with customers where they not only know we have the technical capabilities they need but they feel we were a pleasure to be around and that we find a lot of meaning and purpose in what we do.”