Page 41 - Federal Computer Week, July 2019

that revenue is running about 10 percent to 20 percent ahead of that. Are those numbers still accurate?
A: We’re about 40 percent ahead.
I can officially state that we are at $6 billion a year of new orders and additions to old orders. We just met that [in April], based on the past 12 months.
Q: SEWP has developed
an online dashboard that agency CIOs can use to track purchases by their IT departments. Is that the kind of innovation that is driving increases?
A: It’s primarily that agency-focus, the fact that we are spending a lot of time working with the higher-level agency requirements and not just going to an individual and saying, “Hey, want to use this to buy your computer?” We’re saying, “Hey,
do you want to use this to make strategic decisions?” We have what we call internal agency catalogs, where an agency can say, “Can you have a place that shows me all the printers that meet my needs on your contract,” and you can go to that list and see the printers. That’s a very broad sense of what it is, but that gives another tool to the decision- makers even before the order is made. We really try to focus on the strategic role that we can play and that has caught the attention of agencies that used to do their own contracts because that’s how they thought they could control what’s being bought and see what’s being bought. Now we’re saying, “No, you don’t have to spend all time doing
your own contracts. Use us and we will give you all that information, all that control.”
Q: How does SEWP’s evolution of SEWP mesh with what’s trending in government acquisition in general?
A: Acquisition is always better
if there’s more information that you can provide. As an example, we now provide a page that summarizes FedRAMP. There’s a massive page – or pages – out there of information that GSA monitors. We take that information and condense it down to a table on a single page that is easily reviewed by customers and shows what’s compliant and where it’s at, and we do that solely because information is key. Even if they don’t use SEWP, it’s open information about a very important acquisition process.
Q: Cloud is among the things you now offer. What about other emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things? Are you seeing increasing demand for those? A: The sensor part is interesting. We do have to balance where that fits in the IT acquisition world. If you’re buying a refrigerator with a sensor in it, is it IoT? And we are currently in SEWP V saying no. In terms of buying the sensors that go on the refrigerators, that
is IT, just not the refrigerator itself. We provide the toolsets that could be used to do a full IoT solution, but at this point we’re kind of held back by the scope to include the actual product that
the sensor might be used for. But
as IoT becomes more prevalent
in everything we do, I think the government in general has to
look at that and say, “How do we classify purchases and when does it become an IT item even though its primary purpose is not IT itself?” That may be a SEWP VI issue in six years, when SEWP V expires.
Q: What changes do you hope to see in SEWP VI?
A: It’s hard to say yet. Certainly, we always at each iteration look
at the scope. We make sure of what fits in. We always want to find the best way to ensure that the companies that hold contracts provide the best service to the government.
Q: In the IT world, six years
is a really long time. Things change so quickly that by
the time you figure out if something is within scope, it’s not wanted anymore.
A: The basics are still there. You talk about AI and cloud and all that, but people still buy laptops and desktops. They may be more compact, they may be more powerful, but we still need the basic toolsets. We still need the services that go with them. By the time we get to six years, which is actually only about four years down the road because we have to start that process several years before the
end of this contract, hopefully we’ll have a good set of knowledge of where we want to go.
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