Federal IT Policy Uncertainty Means IT Market Uncertainty for Vendors
May 19, 2011 – Recession, federal budget cuts, change of leadership and federal IT policy swings are taking toll on IT vendors affecting a sizable chunk of the U.S. IT industry. Many IT subcontractors, Fortune 500 companies among them, depend on the U.S. Federal IT spending, a segment of the U.S economy the size of Iraq’s GDP. We took an interview from a senior Federal IT executive speaking on condition of anonymity.
How does the federal executive and IT professional with 20-year experience within government system see the current situation?
Question: How would you characterize the general state of Federal IT?
Answer: Uncertainty in its worst, meaning policy uncertainty, budget uncertainty and technological uncertainty. A whole lot of new incentives, projects and investments hastily declared, to be put on hold later. Yeah, yeah, we started on premise that the federal cloud is good and the federal dedicated data center is bad, but we stuck on both sides of the fence. The cloud still has to prove that it’s reliable for federal business and the emerging server cluster architecture based on low power (about 10 Watt) processors is a game changer.
Question: What about cyber security?
Answer: Cyber security is more complicated issue. It reminds me homeland security boom in the aftermath of 9/11. You spent a whole lot to harden your defenses, you know that you do the necessary things, but you don’t know whether you got it right or if it makes you more secure. Now is the time to asses and review what has been achieved and what has yet to be done. Meantime boosting investments in Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery is a safe bet.
Question: What opportunities can there possibly be in the Federal IT market given the current uncertainty?
Answer: We need affordable scalable low-energy footprint High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms. A number of federal HPC applications can be solved without only astronomically priced custom-designed supercomputers.
This is just a glimpse of market intelligence provided in our reports.
