With the election of the most technology-savvy president in history, the government sector has quickly become one of the most exciting places to work if you’re a solution provider.
Traditionally, the government sector was hampered by conflicting policies that made it a difficult place for a solution provider to thrive. Worse yet, government agencies are often perceived as being backwaters in terms of acquiring new technology and, from the perspective of many vendors and solution providers, a tough place to make a profit given the constraints of General Services Administration (GSA) contracts.

But with massive suns of economic stimulus money available, a huge number of IT projects that leverage modern technologies are putting governments, particularly the federal government, at the leading edge of enterprise computing.

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According to INPUT, a market research firm in Reston, Va., federal government IT spending will increase to $83.4 billion in 2009, up from $80.8 billion in 2008. Unfortunately, IT spending in the government is tied to tax revenues that could easily decline unless the economy substantially recovers. Spending increases in the Federal IT market are expected to slow down in the next several years—to just under 4 percent annually—after experiencing an average of 7 percent growth a year for the last two decades.

But executives at solution providers that focus exclusively on government agencies report that the opportunity for those of them that are chasing government accounts is not about the number of products sold or the size of the overall budget. Rather the federal government is getting smarter about the money it does spend on IT.

Aquilent, for example, is a solution provider based in Laurel, Md., that is working with hosting provider Terremark and content delivery network provider Akamai to deploy USA.gov on a cloud infrastructure. The movement of USA.gov to a set of cloud services managed by Terremark will save the government millions of dollars on IT infrastructure spending while creating a more streamlined infrastructure environment for Aquilent to deliver additional services.

Aquilent has been focusing for years on delivering on systems that help automate the acquisition process for the government and creating systems that help agencies manage content. Most recently, the company contracted with the Veteran’s
Administration to integrate its Epic acquisition management system, which is based on Microsoft .Net technologies, with a Microsoft SharePoint portal system the VA developed for contractors.

According to Aquilent CEO David Fout, the federal government is in the process of lining up IT initiatives around three core themes set by the president: transparency, collaboration and participation. To that end, spending attached to stimulus spending now has a lot more compliance requirements attached to it and there is a lot more interest these days in cross-agency IT projects that foster collaboration. Finally, the USA.gov portal is being upgraded with a variety of Web 2.0 technologies designed to make it easier for citizens to share information and opinions with government entities.

The end result of all these efforts, says Aquilent CTO Mark Pietrasanta, is that it makes it a whole lot easier for Aquilent to sell its solutions because the company doesn’t have to first sell government officials on the concepts. Instead, he says the government officials are now already committed.

The hope is that this new appreciation for the value of technology at the federal level will eventually make its way of to state and local governments. Once that happens, solution providers may very well see the government sector transformed into a showcase for new and emerging technologies that previously would not have even been considered an option.