It’s been a year since Vistronix Intelligence & Technology Solutions, a Reston, Va.-based contractor, completed three Intelligence Community acquisitions, with its purchase of Objective Solutions, ACG, and ExaTech. Helping guide these acquisitions, and future growth plans in the intelligence sector, has been Tom Lydon, senior vice president of business development for Vistronix.
“Our team has a clear vision of where we are going… to be a mission systems innovator that solves complex data challenges,” says Lydon, who brings 30 years of defense industry expertise to the company. “Everyone here from the CEO to our people onsite are focused on delivering on our mission.” On the one-year anniversary of these acquisitions, Lydon shares what’s next for Vistronix in its rise as a mission systems innovator on the data front.
WashingtonExec: How has growth been progressing in the intelligence sector since the three acquisitions?
Tom Lydon: We have made tremendous progress leveraging the company’s capabilities as we stand up to deliver on larger and more complex programs. We have won new work and we’ve seen impressive growth year over year.
We have established a Technology Council composed of system architects from across the company with the charter of ensuring that we bring the entire portfolio of capabilities to all our customers. By combing our technology prowess with our mission experts, we are delivering the best possible solutions to our clients.
WashingtonExec: What business development strategy are you currently pursuing?
Tom Lydon: We have developed a fourfold strategy that starts with protecting our core business by bidding and winning our re-competes. Second, we are leveraging the 100-plus contracts vehicles that we hold across the company. These vehicles give us an opportunity to move people around when necessary, but maybe more importantly, provide opportunity for regular incremental growth. The third element of our BD strategy is, of course, bidding on new, large prime opportunities. With our deep capabilities and mission expertise, we’ve been able to significantly step up bidding on larger and more complex opportunities.
In fact, we recently bid on one of the single largest contracts released by the government this past year. Bids like this require considerable contributions from all elements of the company. Finally, we’re focusing on taking meaningful development roles on large-scale programs where our innovative technologies allow us to support larger prime contractors on key national development programs. Suffice it to say, we have a robust pipeline and we’re pretty focused on it.
WashingtonExec: What trends are you tracking in the big data space?
Tom Lydon: Big data means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. As one starts to drill down, though, you really need to think about how you best can deliver capabilities in the big data ecosystem. Here at Vistronix we’ve decided that the best way to do that is to focus on priority national security mission sets – cyber and SIGINT operations, OSINT and media exploitation, tactical ISR, and enterprise level data analytics – all of which build on our big data core delivering actionable intelligence. To that end, we’ve spent a lot of time and focus on developing tools for data fusion, pattern detection, content enrichment, and descriptive and predictive cyber analytics.
WashingtonExec: What public-private collaborative efforts are you currently pursuing?
Tom Lydon: Working with universities provides a great opportunity to collaborate with researchers whose work is being done in similar spaces to ours; like the big data area. We have established partnerships with many universities, including George Mason and Virginia Tech, so that we can leverage each other’s capabilities. It is our goal to continue to foster these relationships and leverage them wherever possible.
WashingtonExec: What’s next in your role at Vistronix?
Tom Lydon: I’m happy with the role I have right now. As the lead business developer in our organization, I’m finding I spend more and more time mentoring the next level of leaders coming up the ranks. The opportunity to share the lessons learned from my last 30 years is very rewarding. I came from a big company and moving into this entrepreneurial and fast-paced environment with Vistronix has not only been refreshing, it has been exciting, but probably more than that, it has been remarkably gratifying. We’ve been on an incredible growth curve, and it’s exciting to be a part of that experience.
