Since joining ITC Federal in 2011, a few years after its founding, CEO Greg Fitzgerald has built the company into a leader in AI, IT infrastructure and operations and financial services.
Drawing on his commitment to national security missions and experience at large companies, he grew the organization from a one-person startup into a key partner to the departments of Homeland Security and Justice, delivering technology innovations and proven approaches to better serve their missions.
Today, ITC Federal is at an inflection point going into its 20th year. It’s leaning heavily into its identity as a technology company, diving deeper into defense contracts and making no bones about the fact it’s already driving impact within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, DHS, the U.S. Coast Guard and more.
“We’re being intentional about what we’re doing and building,” Fitzgerald said. “When we built the business, we were aligned by customer set and not necessarily capability set. But today, we are clearly a technology company that is focused on law enforcement systems, financial systems and homeland security.”
Leveraging its 2024 venture capital investment from Blue Delta, ITC Federal is a driver of application development and DevSecOps, cloud deployment and infrastructure, cybersecurity and compliance, and federal financial systems and services.
These days, Fitzgerald says, ITC Federal is only looking forward.
Business Development Meets Mission Mindset
Growing up, Fitzgerald enjoyed competing as an athlete. As an adult, that same competitive drive propels him in business. He always wanted to run his own company.
His first job was supporting a Federal Emergency Management Agency contractor doing congressional correspondence and helping build an early knowledge management system.
With early experience in project management, Fitzgerald soon found his expert niche inside the new business space. Working for CSC, a large system integrator, gave him experience running capture opportunities at a large scale and understanding the business development lifecycle from end to end.
From business development, Fitzgerald’s career soon narrowed its focus to work based on passion for both the mission and solutions.
When he joined ITC, he was ready to apply his experience to scaling what was then a small business. And that, he said, has been “exceptionally rewarding and enjoyable.”
Not that it was easy.
Under his leadership, ITC has navigated everything from federal shutdowns to contracts slipping away.
“I think the industry is hard for a reason — the stakes are real. They matter,” he said. “But the combination of mission, technology and leadership is exactly where I want to be.”
AI at Scale
As AI continues to be top of mind for growth-oriented organizations, its focus has moved from strategy and pilots to execution at scale. Governance, risk management and repeatability all factor into how government agencies think about AI today.
“AI is a clear part of strategy going forward,” Fitzgerald said. “We’re looking at outcomes across identity, devices, networks, application and data but the key thing that matters is the impact to the mission.”
The industry has also reached a maturity point where enterprise DevSecOps is becoming the default operating model. For ITC Federal, that means developers build automation into the lifecycle and delivery process so they can bring more capabilities faster while optimizing for security.
Data modernization and interoperability are clear needs for both business and mission-oriented reasons, he added. That’s especially true across law enforcement and DHS where information and business processes may be stored in data silos.
“We have the opportunity to break down silos and bring those systems together so we can make better decisions,” Fitzgerald said. “Agencies like faster delivery, but it needs to be secure, auditable and sustainable.”
Delivering for Advantage
ITC Federal’s work, Fitzgerald said, is to enable better decision-making with advanced data analytics capabilities, among other tools.
For over a decade, ITC Federal has supported the Coast Guard’s financial systems, helping them achieve a clean audit opinion for more than a decade and bringing financial data sources together for improved decision-making across the organization with the key goal to enable the mission to be more effective.
ITC Federal supports ICE’s multi-cloud enterprise environment, spanning AWS, Microsoft and Google, by automating DevSecOps to speed releases and reduce manual work. Using platform engineering, automation and FinOps, the company helps development teams deliver capabilities to the front line faster in a secure, cost-effective way.
Agile and Ready
Fitzgerald said ITC Federal’s agility is central to its success. He warned that companies that fail to adapt fall behind. He added that ITC Federal maintains its agility by pairing deep mission understanding with a delivery model built for change.
“We’ve got leaders and practitioners with decades of DHS, DOD and DOJ experience as both operators and technologists,” he said. “We can anticipate needs and translate evolving mission priorities into a lot clearer requirements without losing momentum. Our people really live and know the mission.”
Fitzgerald said the company invests ahead of demand. In its next growth phase, leaders are adopting vendor-agnostic solution frameworks so agencies can adopt the right tools at the right time and modernize incrementally instead of waiting for a full system overhaul.
“We call it modernization in place,” he said. “Agencies don’t necessarily have the time and money to do these big overhauls of the past.”
ITC Federal has also reinvested in its dedicated solutions group, which creates reusable accelerators designed to move faster and reduce risk. That group has delivered solutions around platform engineering, intelligent search across voice and data, financial analytics that unify disparate information sources and data mesh capabilities that help law enforcement organizations connect data across systems.
“We’re investing in these so that we can help our partners,” Fitzgerald said. “We’re not doing any of this in isolation. We’re doing this with our customers, working hand in hand with our existing programs to identify what’s needed next and continuously refine these capabilities in real mission environments.”
Resilience, Values and Leadership
For Fitzgerald, success starts with finding exceptional leaders and getting out of their way to allow them to succeed. It also requires prioritizing people.
This year is a prime example. While the majority of ITC wasn’t impacted by the government shutdown, about 30 employees were on programs that got stopped. Instead of shifting that burden onto impacted workers, the leadership team donated all of their PTO to keep everyone employed.
“None of our 30 employees on the bench missed a paycheck,” he said. “That’s the culture we’re building — protect the team, protect the customer and keep moving forward.”
Building the business, Fitzgerald said, was hard. ITC Federal lost contracts, navigated government shutdowns and dealt with cash flow and workforce issues. There were moments when walking away might have been the easier choice.
“It makes me proud that we kept pushing through it, learning through it and building a stronger company because of it,” he said. “It feels like we’ve earned our right to be in the market.”