Once a buzzword, now the norm, cloud has become the standard for digital environments everywhere. As government agencies use this technology to modernize and transform, IT leaders drive the push to adopt and maintain secure, cloud-based enterprises. We’ve identified those in industry and government ensuring the nation is equipped with the tools it needs to drive productivity and build a foundation for advanced technologies — even through a pandemic.
WashingtonExec’s Top Cloud Executives to Watch in 2023 highlights leaders constantly on the cutting edge of tech innovation. They’ve been working on cloud adoption throughout their careers and are dedicated to providing customers with the environments they need to safely and efficiently meet mission needs. Plus, they bring the expertise, vision and problem-solving spirit that helped the nation meet IT challenges during a difficult year.
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Justin Shirk
Managing Director, Cloud GTM & Secure Mission Lead, Accenture Federal Services
In 2022, Justin Shirk led the charge in getting one of his favorite customers and missions into the cloud for large-scale model-based simulation activities.
“The team did an excellent job collaborating across the government space with assessors, stakeholders and mission owners to really deliver value,” he said. “There are a lot of ‘sleepy’ areas in IT, particularly in the defense and national security space, that can be refactored in the cloud and just really enable people to simply do their job that they weren’t really able to do before easily.”
Tiffanny Gates, senior managing director and national security portfolio lead, said she’s had the privilege of working alongside Shirk for six years and has personally witnessed his leadership success, first at Novetta and now, following the acquisition, at Accenture Federal Services.
“Justin has led many impressive initiatives to help clients achieve breakthroughs by bringing together the best talent and disruptive technologies to set new standards for innovation in the national security cloud space,” she said. “Justin’s recent promotion to the role of cloud go-to-market lead at Accenture Federal Services was well-deserved, and I’m thrilled about his selection as Top Cloud Exec to Watch in federal contracting and government for 2022.”
Why Watch
In 2022, Shirk’s team was heavily focused on proliferating the synergy across Accenture Federal Services from the Novetta acquisition, particularly in the cloud space.
“Accenture Federal Services has a lot of great cloud assets and approaches, like the recently announced Velocity offering for AWS that greatly accelerates migrations,” he said. “At Novetta, we also had a lot of differentiated assets, too.”
One of those is CloudTracker, which provides a 360-degree view of the governance and financial operations of cloud, on both Azure and AWS. Cross-pollinating ⏤ and getting the tech and account teams to strategize in both directions to more rapidly enable cloud for customers ⏤ was really the theme of 2022.
“‘Think strategically, but act quickly and decisively,’ is a theme I’ve always carried for my career,” Shirk said. “In the U.S. federal market this is so important because the mission is so important, so real time, and so meaningful. You personally gel with like-minded folks as customers, and technologies. Once you’re in it, cloud in the federal government feels fast and really transformative. I love being a part of that.”
Jason Payne
Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Federal
As CTO of Microsoft Federal, Jason Payne is proud of the work the federal team has been doing on zero trust to help the U.S. government unlock and strengthen its full inter- and intra-agency cyber capabilities.
“Jason is a well-respected innovator that I am proud to have as part of our leadership team,” said Rick Wagner, president of Microsoft Federal. “He is a trusted partner that puts the needs of our federal customers first. With more than 20 years of industry experience, he is consistently developing groundbreaking solutions for our customers and helps us further solidify Microsoft’s position as the leader in federal digital transformation.”
The volume and complexity of the work the government has done ⏤ at the thought leadership, education, advocacy and technical leadership levels ⏤ has led to tremendous progress in meeting mandates over the last year.
Most agencies now have a clear, compelling zero trust strategy, and they all have implementations of the minimum bar as defined in the original executive order ⏤ from multifactor authentication to modernizing legacy applications via secure cloud technologies.
“Being part of the process with our U.S. government customers and seeing implementations come to life has been tremendously gratifying,” Payne said. “One of the best examples I’ve seen that’s showcased implementation at government scale has been the Navy’s commitment to quickly enabling secure remote work by strengthening its comprehensive zero trust architecture to protect identities, networks, devices, applications and data no matter the location of Navy personnel.”
Why Watch
Looking ahead, Payne’s team will continue to focus on enabling vast opportunities through its classified cloud framework. This comes to life within the defense industrial base ecosystem, where mission platform collaboration holds a whole new era of innovation for the industry ⏤ in everything from machine learning and AI to advanced networking and secure 5G capabilities at the tactical edge.
On the civilian side, Payne’s team sees it in climate science, pandemic responses and beyond where data sets can be pulled together to drive insights. Today’s technology maturity will help Microsoft Federal address any number of human and governmental challenges or mission needs.
“We have tremendous opportunity to come alongside our government agency partners to solve big challenges,” Payne said. “I’ll always be a technologist, so I love seeing and showing how really cool technology is breaking down some of the toughest barriers to progress. To steal from Winston Churchill, ‘A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.’ I’m super bullish on how we can and will continue to press through the difficulties to get to the opportunity over the horizon.”
Mike Hurt
Vice President of Federal, Palo Alto Networks
When Mike Hurt was originally looking for a company to join, he knew he didn’t want a “one-trick pony,” focused only on one specific area of cybersecurity. “I wanted to work for a company that was not only specifically security-focused, but also keen to address the three main areas of cybersecurity: endpoint, network and cloud,” he said. “Palo Alto more than meets what I was looking for, and I can’t wait to see where the next year takes us.”
Today, his recent biggest achievement was working to secure Palo Alto Networks’ recently announced Defense Department deal. This is a game-changer for DOD, Hurt said, and his team is thrilled to bring its Xpanse platform to one of the most important networks in the world.
“I’m tremendously proud of the federal team we have at Palo Alto,” he said. “Everyone is committed to giving their all each day, and that combined dedication is paying off; we are really on the move.”
Why Watch
In 2023, Hurt’s team is heavily focused on bringing awareness for customers ⏤ showing them how the company’s portfolio works together and how they can take advantage of what Palo Alto Networks has to offer.
“We’re very proud of our capabilities and have done an excellent job inside the federal space, establishing ourselves as the ‘best-in-class’ for network security and firewalls,” Hurt said. But the main growth strategy he’s been working on since joining the company has been articulating its full breadth of solutions.
“Mike has been incredibly instrumental in our federal work at Palo Alto Networks delivering platform-based security to our customers,” said Eric Trexler, senior vice president of U.S. public sector. “His leadership and expertise are absolutely critical in securing our civilian agency and Department of Defense customers’ environments, and I can’t wait to see what he continues to bring to the table in the future.”
John Sankovich
President of Cloud, SMX
Last November, SMX launched SMX Elevate, which is shaping the digital transformation journey by putting outcomes first with a focus on solutions that are highly automated, secure, resilient and scalable.
This innovative solution delivery model combines the company’s proprietary intelligent automation software platform with expert consulting teams to deliver flexible digital modernization solutions to our customers, all guided by advisers and technology experts whose roles are measured by results and not time spent.
“Our team is really motivated to disrupt the status quo on behalf of our customers and bring a different type of solution to solve their needs through SMX Elevate™,” said SMX President of Cloud John Sankovich. “Elevate represents years of investment in our people and platform along with decades of partnerships with AWS, Microsoft and Google. True digital transformation should accelerate outcomes, and that’s what we aim to do for our customers. We’re ready to tackle the toughest, most complicated problems and raise the standard for digital solutions.”
Why Watch
In 2023, SMX is ready to hit the ground running with a better solution that meets its customers where they are in their transformation journey. SMX Elevate will allow more focus on business and mission outcomes while SMX handles the rest. Elevate alleviates budgetary pressures through predictable costs tied to outcomes and bridges technology skills gaps by arming the customer with our teams of experts.
“John and his team demonstrate their commitment to helping our clients accelerate their missions daily,” said SMX CEO Peter LaMontagne. “His recent collaboration with our strategy and technology team to launch SMX Elevate ⏤ a new model to deliver streamlined processes, smarter decisions and stronger results ⏤ solidifies his focus on continually innovating to drive better outcomes for our clients. I look forward to seeing how John and the cloud solutions team continue to help our current and future clients reimagine their transformation journeys in 2023.”
Christian Hoff
Director of U.S. Federal Civilian & Health Team, Amazon Web Services
Over the past year, IT modernization and cloud adoption continued to play a critical role in transforming public sector service delivery. Christian Hoff says he’s proud of the work his team has done to support federal customers as they turned to AWS to migrate to the cloud.
“It’s great to see how Christian and his team are helping federal organizations take advantage of the benefits of the cloud to transform the citizen experience,” said Dave Levy, vice president of federal, nonprofit and healthcare at AWS.
Why Watch
Looking ahead, federal leaders will continue to have an opportunity to rethink how they process and administer a wide range of federal services, including retirement payments, health care benefits and food subsidies, federal grants, education and housing loans and taxes. Hoff and his team will keep helping agencies move faster than ever to upgrade citizen service and elevate the customer experience by leveraging the cloud.
“When AWS started its public sector business, potential public sector customers were primarily attracted to cloud to save money and promote efficiencies by hosting websites on the cloud and using cloud storage,” Hoff said. “Today, cloud services, including AI and machine learning, are helping customers across the U.S. government improve the ways they deliver on their missions.”
John DeVoe
Senior Vice President of Aerospace and Defense, Salesforce
John DeVoe joined salesforce 15 years ago to help build its then-new public sector business. He transitioned roles five years ago to focus on the aerospace and the government contracting industry, one where he could leverage 25 years of experience as a government employee and in private industry.
Salesforce has experienced incredible growth since founded in 1999, and while its public sector business was quite small when DeVoe joined the company, it now extends to government agencies and contractors around the world.
When asked about his achievements, DeVoe described what he learned from CEO Marc Benioff and Global Public Sector President Dave Rey.
“Start with a beginner’s mind, listen deeply to your customers, think big, constantly prioritize, and recognize change is simply an opportunity waiting,” he said. “Achievements will follow.”
Why Watch
DeVoe praises his teams for their enormous commitment to GovCon customers and their ability to embrace change.
“One of the most important shifts we made recently is to engage industry program managers as CEOs,” he said. “They share many of the same business challenges as their employers — customer and program success, growth, risk reduction, talent management and supply chain. We simply love helping our customers address their challenges.”
Craig Shinn
Vice President of Digital Government Solutions, Maximus
An industry veteran with over two decades of technology expertise, Craig Shinn joined Maximus this fall ⏤ and hit the ground running.
“My excitement in joining Maximus was the potential to take the incredible work the company has done for years, including with enrollment and contact centers, and expanding that to create a broader, more holistic view of citizen services for state and local government agencies,” he said.
As vice president of digital government solutions, Shinn will leverage his expertise to deliver innovative technology solutions for state and local governments aimed at improving the user experience.
“One of the biggest lessons we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is the need for constituents and businesses to interact with government agencies in myriad ways, beyond only going to an office in person,” he said.
Why Watch
Shinn joins Maximus as the company continues to expand and invest in its U.S. services business, which recently signed new technology contracts with several states to help with citizen services. Shinn and Robert Knapp, who joined Maximus last summer, were new executives brought in to bolster the company’s work with state and local governments.
“One of our major goals is to accomplish something that no state has fully accomplished yet, and that’s to implement a comprehensive customer experience for all state agencies,” Shinn explained. “Right now, state information systems exist in silos, so you must work with one agency for your driver’s license, but a different agency for a business license. Our aim is to use the Maximus track record of success with government agencies, and our unique knowledge of technology and cloud, to deliver this for states.”
Joseph Flynn
Public Sector Chief Technology Officer, Boomi
This year, Joseph Flynn helped agencies overcome some of the most complex modern agency IT modernization challenges they face today. These hurdles include creating applications that address citizen experience goals, integrating systems that mitigate security challenges and bridging legacy and modern platforms to smooth agency transitions to the cloud.
Re-envisioning an agency’s identity credential access management system, to empower the agency to securely issue and confirm credentials for more than 9,000 employees is one example he’s particularly proud of. Frustrated by its cumbersome legacy system, the agency needed a streamlined, secure process to issue and confirm credentials for its employees, as well as its third-party vendors and partners.
“We worked with them to design a platform that simplified access and integrated systems into a single interface using iPaaS, which seamlessly consolidated and connected the data from disparate systems and resources,” he said.
Why Watch
In 2022, Flynn’s team focused on expanding its public sector organization and securing authorizations, like FedRAMP, to best support government customers. As the principal technologist, Flynn aims to provide the strongest dedicated support to the public sector market, especially as it prioritizes the citizen experience.
“Expanding our team and prioritizing tools and resources are just the beginning as our Boomi Public Sector team works with customers across the public sector landscape to accelerate their integration and cloud migration initiatives,” he said. “As a result of these priorities, we are going to see more government organizations have increased productivity and efficiency, and improved CX through iPaaS.”
Brad Moore
Vice President & Director of Enterprise Information Systems, AMERICAN SYSTEMS
Since 2011, Brad Moore has focused on delivering enterprise IT services and solutions across the federal government. He has successfully helped expand AMERICAN SYSTEMS’ IT services portfolio, supporting customers in CONUS/OCONUS locations with comprehensive managed IT services.
“Brad has done a great job gaining the trust of our customers by providing smart solutions to their complex challenges and enabling them to accomplish their missions,” said Peter Smith, president and CEO of AMERICAN SYSTEMS.
Moore’s biggest achievement in 2022 was leading the capture efforts that resulted in the award of a consolidated information management contract to support the digital transformation of a long-time customer. The approach included using a hybrid cloud solution that brings critical IT services for global on-demand access to essential mission systems.
“I am very pleased (our customer), whom we have supported since I joined AMERICAN SYSTEMS in 2011, had the confidence and trust in my team to continue supporting the modernization of their critical mission,” Moore said.
Why Watch
Moving forward, Moore’s team is heavily focused on accelerating digital transformation, modernization and cloud services adoption for federal customers.
“In my organization, I am very fortunate to work with a talented team of IT professionals that possess the business knowledge and IT experience to serve our customers as they move through each of their unique digital transformations,” Moore said. “Some organizations have already started the process of IT modernization; but no matter where they may be in the adoption of cloud and other digital services, our team continues to find innovative ways to help them solve complex challenges.”
Robert “Bob” J. Schumm
Vice President of the National Security Group, Oracle
In 2020, Bob Schumm was selected to lead sales for Oracle’s expanded national security business, bringing unified, holistic coverage of the company’s work across the Defense Department, the intelligence community and the Department of Homeland Security under a single leader with over 30 years of federal IT experience.
“Oracle has invested billions of dollars to bring our next-generation cloud infrastructure and applications to the national security community,” Schumm said. “We are deeply committed to serving the unique needs of defense, intelligence and homeland customers with secure, open and cost-effective cloud computing.”
Why Watch
Oracle has shown impressive momentum, achieving dozens of FedRAMP authorizations in the past year alone. This includes authorizations to host Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information and Special Access Program missions and FedRAMP+ authorization, adding to Oracle’s growing list of DISA and FedRAMP High accreditations.
Schumm and his team believe this is just the beginning. As the national security community continues to prioritize modernization and adopt a multicloud model, Oracle is focused on interoperability and ideally positioned to help defense and intelligence community customers innovate faster for better mission outcomes.
“Bob’s technical depth, coupled with his mission expertise and customer commitment, has been critical to both Oracle and our customers as we move to the cloud,” said Glen Dodson, senior vice president of the National Security Group at Oracle.
Peter O’Donoghue
Chief Technology Officer, Leidos Civil Group
Peter O’Donoghue has led a team that established a practical cloud vision for the Leidos Civil Group, set investment priorities and drove the creation of critical capabilities to simplify cloud adoption and optimization.
“Under Peter’s leadership, Leidos is able to consistently evolve our cloud business strategy and offerings to enable our customers to rapidly leverage evolving cloud capabilities,” said Jim Carlini, Leidos chief technology officer.
O’Donoghue also worked to expand Leidos’ cloud focus to further embrace a multicloud mindset. He helped increase the company’s certifications across providers, ensuring Leidos can securely drive transformation across each of the major cloud service provider platforms.
“It’s important to remember that implementing technology is not an end unto itself,” O’Donoghue said. “Leidos’ role as public sector cloud integrator is to ensure that customers have access to staggering innovation being born on the cloud to drive their mission more effectively and nimbly, while ensuring cloud resources are provided in a secure, resilient, transparent and cost-effective way.”
Why Watch
Leidos teams are preparing for the next chapter of cloud, with a focus on multicloud, distributed environments and an understanding of the need to harness the transformative nature of cloud adoption.
“Our focus is on taming the use of cloud, ensuring that we can monitor, govern, secure and assure compliance across each of the key providers while allowing our customers to access the innovations and unique features of the cloud providers,” O’Donoghue said. “We’re also focusing on leveraging cloud native capabilities to build mission applications and analytics spanning from the mission edge to public cloud.”
Shannon Sullivan
Defense Director, Google Public Sector
Shannon Sullivan is especially excited about his team’s partnership with the Army, which helped the service deploy a cloud-first collaboration solution with Google Workspace. It’s designed to improve upon more traditional technologies with unparalleled security and versatility. In fact, in just two weeks, Sullivan’s team onboarded 160,000 soldiers.
“We want to bring the magic of Google to help the U.S. government,” Sullivan said. “Having a choice in cloud vendors helps to accelerate the U.S. government’s digital transformation, unlocks innovation and helps the government control cost.”
Why Watch
Sullivan’s team is focused on helping federal agencies modernize their technology. Having choice in cloud vendors helps unleash innovation, save on costs and better the government’s security posture, he said.
“Shannon has been a champion for federal technologists as Google has doubled down on its investment in public sector in recent years,” said Tricia Davis-Muffett, head of global public sector marketing at Google Cloud. “This is evidenced by our recent achievements in partnering with the U.S. Army and achieving the Department of Defense Impact Level 5 provisional authorization to support Google Public Sector’s ongoing commitment to the industry.”
Lillian Chang
Senior Vice President of Product Strategy, SAP National Security Services
During Lillian Chang’s tenure, the organization has grown from one to 12 different cloud products and expanded its cloud portfolio across the U.S., Australia and Canada. Digital transformation is about adopting and using new business capabilities in a consumable model, she said, and the team’s greatest achievement is providing highly regulated customers around the world with innovation that directly impacts their organization.
“In order to deliver these new capabilities, my team helps to design cloud solutions intended for a target customer industry,” she said. “This personalization includes business requirements, architecture, adoption models and metrics for success. Our primary focus is managing and promoting an entire cloud portfolio tailored to the industries that we support.”
Why Watch
Building on her experience with SAP since 1998, Chang is poised to leverage her background in partner management, solution management, go-to-market and as a presales senior director at SAP Regulated Industry to address today’s challenges.
“Lillian is an exemplary leader who understands the cloud deployments requirements in the critical infrastructure industries,” said Harish Luthra, CEO of SAP NS2. “Over the past several years, she has successfully driven her team to deploy SAP cloud portfolio strategy and execution here at SAP NS2.”
Kristin Cochran
Vice President of Digital Solutions, Siemens Government Technologies
As customers increasingly use the cloud to support their digital transformation efforts, Kristin Cochran and her team are making investments to ensure solutions and applications can be implemented where they best serve the mission, whether that’s on-premise or in the cloud. Siemens Defense Cloud is just the company’s first step with more cloud tools and services to come.
A major focus is to leverage one of Siemens’ industrial software portfolios to solve significant challenges in digital transformation for the company’s government customers, Cochran said.
“Last summer, we took a major step forward with the introduction of our FedRAMP Ready Siemens Defense Cloud Software-as-a-Service application, which features the product lifecycle management software Teamcenter X as its foundation,” she said. “With the U.S. Air Force using Teamcenter to support its digital acquisition and sustainment strategy today, it’s an exciting time as we migrate more capabilities to the cloud.”
Why Watch
“Kristin and her team are pioneering new ways for our customers to address critical challenges in development, modernization and sustainment of essential national security systems,” said John Ustica, Siemens Government Technologies president and CEO. “Thanks to their tireless focus on our customer’s challenges, I’m excited to see how their efforts will continue to transform our business and expand our customer’s digital capabilities moving forward.”
Sandeep Shilawat
Vice President in Cloud and Edge Computing, ManTech
In 2022, Sandeep Shilawat built ManTech’s 5G/IoT Lab with enterprise and tactical cloud environments for experimentation of emerging technologies customers are eager to pursue.
The lab is a test bed for the implementation of various mission-critical use cases. For example, Shilawat’s team built a series of capabilities like Combat Cloud for the Internet of Battlefield Things. ManTech’s Combat Cloud provides awareness at the tactical edge and enables customers to make faster decisions for critical missions.
Why Watch
Throughout the year, Shilawat and his team remained heavily focused on bringing cloud capabilities to the customer as part of the company’s “Bringing Digital to Mission” strategy. This includes working on edge cloud, tactical cloud, distributed cloud and multidomain cloud solutions that deliver outstanding results for customers’ mission programs.
“Fundamental to everything I do is my motto: ‘Simplify IT.’ If it is not sufficient to merely understand IT ⏤ we must focus on making it simpler,” Shilawat said.
Ravi Raghava
Vice President, Cloud Solutions, SAIC
Ravi Raghava joined SAIC in 2022 to lead the cloud strategy for SAIC’s Defense and Civilian sector. With over 13 years of cloud experience, Raghava has helped expand SAIC’s digital capabilities to support enterprise growth and deliver innovative cloud solutions to support customer’s critical missions.
“I am committed to engaging with federal leaders and the industry in bringing best-in-class solutions and knowledge to our customers around cloud, cyber, edge and data,” said Raghava. “Providing solutions to our customers most critical needs is a priority for me and my team.”
In 2022, Raghava and his team worked with customers to provide cloud strategy and long-term enterprise roadmaps. He also developed best practices around secure multi-cloud solutions, cloud FinOps and innovative data-driven solutions. Raghava is extremely proud of the frameworks and innovative solutions his team has built in these areas.
“Ravi’s extensive knowledge in building and producing successful cloud strategies has helped propel our company to become a market leader in cloud,” said Ravi Dankanikote, senior vice president of business development at SAIC. “He is an innovative and thoughtful leader who encourages his team to deliver large scale, cost-efficient, and mission-oriented solutions to our customers on time, and on schedule.”
Why Watch
Looking ahead, SAIC remains focused on delivering solutions to help customers accelerate cloud adoption, secure mission-critical infrastructures, and deploy artificial intelligence and machine learning for data driven solutions. SAIC’s expansion of its intelligent data solutions, CloudScend multi-cloud ecosystem and Koverse, address customers most pressing mission needs and optimize their cloud migration.
“Customers are sitting on piles of data most of which is largely unmined and untapped. I want to help customers build solutions centered around data powered by the cloud to deliver actionable intelligence, improve decision-making capabilities and thwart threats to our nation’s infrastructure,” Raghava said. “My team and I look forward to leading cloud expansion, IT modernization and advancing the development of NextGen solutions. We are helping customers transform the way they do business.”
