As vice president of sales for the Army, Defense Information Systems Agency and intel at Iron Bow, Henry Tragle is helping the military meet its technology needs. That’s no small lift these days.
Defense organizations are trying to figure out how best to apply artificial intelligence to elevate mission outcomes. They’re working to implement Zero Trust Architectures and move to hybrid cloud infrastructures.
At the same time, “there’s a significant amount of technical debt that has built up,” and agencies struggle to effectively acquire the needed upgrades, Tragle said. While Iron Bow is working to address all these issues, it’s giving special emphasis to this last point.
With solicitations becoming more consolidated and centralized, “we have restructured our go-to-market model to meet the demand signal and better address customer requirements,” he said. To that end, Iron Bow has evolved from a traditional value-added reseller position, “to become what we call an NGSP, a Next Generation Solutions Provider,” Tragle said.
The shift “enables us to partner with the large service providers and system integrators to help fill their gaps with our advanced systems engineering capability,” he added.
Iron Bow has defined four key pillars of capability: IT modernization, digital transformation, cybersecurity and workplace modernization. In support of this, it simultaneously rolled out novel hardware-as-a-subscription and enterprise agreement models, “giving the customer new acquisition options” to help address technical debt, Tragle said.
To help agencies shift from capital to operational spending, Iron Bow delivers what it calls next-generation lifecycle management ⏤ effectively, a hardware subscription.
“For customers operating on annual budgets, we can provide their IT on a subscription basis,” Tragle said. “It makes their budget on a year-to-year basis more predictable. We provide all the hardware integration, training, and eliminate the need for multiple contract actions. And the customer will always have the latest and greatest hardware as well as tech architectures.”
Tragle used a golf course maintenance analogy to underscore the point.
“On a golf course, maintenance crews don’t want to keep up with all of the latest lawnmowers, trimmers and edgers,” he said. “They just want to make sure that the blades are sharp and ready. In a subscription model, customers pay a monthly bill and they always have the latest and greatest equipment.”
That’s what next-generation lifecycle management offers the military on the IT side.
“They keep their employees, become more efficient, and they’re not all wrapped up in what they need to buy, what needs to be replaced, and are no longer liable if the equipment falls off the Approved Products List (APL),” he said. “They’re essentially outsourcing all that responsibility with a single subscription bill.”
While the model offers obvious wins for the military, Tragle said there’s work still to be done in driving adoption. How to get the military to manage its technology spend differently just takes time.
“Everybody’s in agreement that this is the most efficient way forward,” he said. “The appetite for this is definitely there.”
Even as Tragle looks to help the military pivot on its IT acquisitions, he’s working internally to ensure seamless adoption of Iron Bow’s restructuring efforts.
“Change is always difficult, especially when people have been in a position for a long period of time,” he said. “When things are already going well, it can be hard to change to a new model.”
Strong leadership has been key to success, as Iron Bow has redefined its operating model.
“We’ve had appropriate communication up and down the organization, ensuring everybody knows what our goal is,” Tragle said. “Our goal is not 10 or 15 percent growth. Our goal is 30 percent growth, and to do that, there had to be dramatic change.”
There have been structural adjustments, too, especially on the sales side.
“We have developed a customized sales methodology that has six different phases called CSX, the Consultive Sales Experience,” he said. Rigorous processes like this help to ensure the restructured business model rolls out effectively in support of customers’ mission needs.
Tragle started his career as a contractor supporting the Office of Secretary of Defense, and he said he’s pleased to still be part of the ongoing effort to help the military improve.
“I’ve always been involved in sports,” he said. “I started with football, wrestling, and track, and later I was very competitive with Ironman: I competed in the world championships in Hawaii.”
And just as in sporting events, success in the GovCon space is a team effort.
“What I enjoy now is building the industry’s best sales team possible,” Tragle said. “I love to see my team become successful.”