This Week in Public Sector Innovation

New GovWin Consulting report shows growth of electronic storage: A new report from Deltek GovWin shows a continuing increase in spending on electronic data storage. GovWin targets the current size of the market at just over $1 billion, representing an increase of 22% over the last three years. The market is being driven by an explosion in the amount of electronic data federal agencies collect and store, with the Defense Department leading the way. Read GovWin’s blog post describing their findings and methodology here.

Intelligence Community Accelerating Move to Cloud: Earlier this week, Director of National Intelligence, General James Clapper updated plans for the IC’s move to cloud computing, stating at the GEOINT Symposium that the IC would reach initial operating capability on shared IT infrastructure by March 2013 and moving the entire IC infrastructure to the shared platform by 2018. The move to shared IT services will include a IC-wide common desktop being developed by DIA and NGA. Among the outstanding questions impacting the move is how to handle software licensing and it appears the Intelligence Community will work together to develop a new licensing model that will take into account a more services-oriented technology environment. Federal News Radio has a full story.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Hosts Public Sector Summit: On Wednesday, AWS held its 3rd Annual Public Sector Summit and announced continued growth in the public sector, with some 300 government agencies (federal and SLG) and 1500 educational institutions now using the AWS Cloud. They also announced increased capabilities for the AWS GovCloud, a dedicated community cloud for federal customers. Chief among those features is high-performance supercomputing capability made available through Amazon’s Compute Cluster Instances. Information Week has a good wrap up.

SIIA Federal Cloud Survey Goes Live: Last week SIIA’s Public Sector Innovation Group launched its inaugural Federal Cloud Survey, seeking to aggregate data on the federal government’s progress in adopting cloud computing, mobile technologies, and data center consolidation. Federal government IT professionals are encouraged to have their voice heard by responding to the survey, which can be found here. The findings of the survey will be published as part of SIIA’s Cloud/Gov Conference in Washington, DC on February 12, 2013. Learn more about Cloud/Gov here.


Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

Software Division CEO Insights: Audrey Spangenberg, FPX

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

Does Mobile fall into one of your top 5 priorities for 2012? If so, how will you be attacking it? If not, why not?

Mobile remains a top priority for FPX in 2012. FPX’s core business centers on enabling sales teams to be more successful by responding quickly, if not instantly, to the needs and requests of their prospects and customers. Since every sales situation today is highly competitive, buyers have the power. FPX is committed to equipping our customers to serve their prospects whenever and wherever those customers expect; enabling them to take action immediately. Only a solid mobile component of a greater sales process system can do that.

When sales people have the solutions they need at their fingertips, they have the information they need to give their prospects the confidence needed to buy.

Our commitment to providing superior mobile solutions, beginning with the Budgetary Quotes Mobile App that we released in late 2011, means platform agnostic apps. Our strategy is to continue to develop mobile apps for people, not for a specific device. Our core competency is to exceed the expectations of our customers, allowing them the ability to access their sales systems and solutions from any mobile device.

In 2020, looking back on this decade, what will be the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth?

Cloud computing, and the Software-as-a-Service model, will prove the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth today and for the foreseeable future. The transformative power of the cloud is driving innovation virtually everywhere, but its most significant impact will come from bringing to bear the power of solutions previously only available through on-premise systems without the inherent expenses.

This is already creating a movement away from on-premise software installs to SaaS solutions, especially under certain conditions. In the CRM and Configure-Price-Quote® marketplace, SaaS provides undeniable benefits including lower initial cost and total costs of ownership, higher ROI, and reduced strain on IT resources to name a few.

FPX is committed to this model. As one of a very limited number of providers of SaaS-based, multi-tenant sales process solutions, we are increasingly attracting enterprise customers who, in the past, would have had to select a big-box on-premise software provider.

This demand is already pervasive. Adoption to the Cloud empowers companies to transform their business models and gain a competitive advantage. The Cloud allows companies to be agile and enable the development of effective virtual business processes, which will facilitate their employees, customers, partners and suppliers to connect and conduct business seamlessly.

According to a recent study by Bain & Company, the cloud computing share of the tech wallet will quadruple by 2020, growing nearly six-times faster through the end of the decade than spend on legacy hardware and software.

Social media and social business are big themes for 2012. In which areas of business will the social movement have the most impact (or most potential for impact)? Why?

Social media and social business will impact sales and marketing more than any other area of business. In B2C selling situations, consumers have always had access to the thoughts and opinions of those they trusted. This provided consumers a limited degree of power in making personal purchase decisions. For the most part, however, retailers have held most of the power.

Online social media has radically shifted the power in the B2C space from retailers to consumers. Consumers in the early stages of the purchase process now have ready access to others who are farther along in that same process. They can search out reviews, polls, comments, and can even engage in conversations about retailers, products and brands with those they choose and trust. This arms them with knowledge long before they enter a store or engage with an online retailer. Further, the input of others can either undermines or substantiate the claims made by expensive advertising and marketing campaigns.

In the same way, those responsible for making purchase decisions in B2B environments now have access to the opinions and experiences of those with similar responsibilities. Using social media including LinkedIn, salesforce.com’s Chatter, Twitter and a myriad of other specialized networks, decision makers have access to credible sources of information prior to and during the vendor selection process.

The use of social media among business professionals levels the communication playing field. A buyer in a B2B situation can quickly investigate any claim made by a sales person or contained in a company’s marketing collateral. Companies who exaggerate their claims do so with a high degree of peril. However, companies that are committed to customer success will be rewarded for their efforts. As the use of social media increases among business professionals, companies selling to other companies must remember that they are ultimately selling to people. Social media has the potential to push the phrase B2B into obsolescence, making P2P the new reality.


Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

Software Division CEO Insights: Karthic Athreya, ForteHCM

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

As you look around the globe, which markets will provide the best opportunities for tech companies in the next five years?

Most of recent growth trajectory and net job addition seems to be coming from mobility/ social space. With more and more people accessing their social, email and other day to day functions/ applications via their mobile, app development in mobile is a given. India as a target & growth market cannot be ignored. Tele-density has been increasing at a random pace and the telecom sector itself has been growing at more than 25%. Some interesting dynamics include land line adoption of only ~ 35 million whereas cell phone adoption at ~ 882 million. Recent Mckinsey study revealed that India’s internet users will increase fivefold by 2015 and more than 3 quarters of them will choose mobile access. Gartner sees the penetration reaching 82% in 2014.

Yet with all this growth, infrastructure is a challenge and it isn’t going to be easy. Of the country’s 100 million Internet users, just 12.5 million have broadband, compared with 450 million households in China. Internet speeds are sluggish compared to international average of 5.6 mbps. Policymakers are trying to solve this by utilizing cable TV lines. However there are couple challenges to this approach-most of the subscribers only have analog connection and upgrading infrastructure isn’t going to be cheap. Secondly it isn’t going to be easy to up convert an analog box to digital box. Given the demographics, companies might have to push the box at real low price.

Now, where there is a challenge there is an opportunity. Mobile content and applications could be the answer.

There are over 850 million registered mobile numbers (these numbers are skewed as there are multiple accounts registered to the same user). Average revenue per registered number has fallen over the years and service providers are constantly looking for ways to up that. Mobile apps if delivered at affordable prices and with the right content will deliver attractive returns to content and application development companies. As long as the applications are compelling and tuned to local demographics (more so with all the different languages spoken and read) and the pricing right (in order to attract the low end of the demographics), all players can make some money. With mobile advertising picking steam, local ads could be another money spinner.

If email takes a backseat to Facebook, Twitter, and SMS for business communication in 5 years, how will that change your business strategy? What are you doing today to prepare for that possibility?

It is true that new channels have come up but I think there is a synergy between new channels and email. You still need an email to login to Twitter and Facebook. You still get notifications via email for updated info and new followers. It is true that web based email is starting to take a back seat but that is web based. Mobile email usage is skyrocketing. In fact comscore’s own numbers show that about 30% of American mobile users regularly access email via smartphones / mobile devices.

Numerous studies have shown that email is still one of the most effective ways to drive online and offline sales, and is the preferred method by which consumers are notified of offers. Sure, there are better ways to communicate a single line or a short message but the way twitter and Facebook is set up, it is difficult to imagine that someone would send a contract via social sites.

While in about 5 years Facebook and the probably likes may take over intranet communications, for all external communications email still might make sense. I wouldn’t change the business strategy yet…


Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

Software CODiE Awards: Tips & Tricks for CODiE Success

Yesterday we hosted a CODiE Awards webinar specifically for software categories. The primary purpose of the webinar was to provide important updates made to the process, including the addition/revision of several categories for a total of 29 software-related categories.

During the webinar we covered:

  • How to nominate
  • What happens during the first-round judging process
  • The complete CODiE Awards timeline
  • A review of software categories

We were especially pleased to have two guests join us for the webinar: Sarah Lander, Director of Marketing for ShopVisible and a 2012 CODiE Award winner, and Richard Dym, Managing Partner of Bondi Group, a longtime CODiE Awards judge.

Watch the webinar to hear everything that Sarah and Richard had to say, in addition to the information we provided. And remember, nominations for the Software categories must be submitted by Friday, October 5.


Wendy Tanner Wendy Tanner is CODiE Awards Coordinator. Follow the CODiE Awards on Twitter @CODiEAwards

This Week in Public Sector Innovation

GAO Report highlights need to Leverage EA for cost savings: Earlier this week GAO issued a report highlighting the need for government agencies to better utilize enterprise architecture. GAO points out that “effective use of enterprise architecture is a hallmark of successful organizations and can be important to achieving operations and technology environments that maximize institutional mission performance and outcomes. Among other things, this includes realizing cost savings through consolidation and reuse of shared services and elimination of antiquated and redundant mission operations, enhancing information sharing through data standardization and system integration, and optimizing service delivery through streamlining and normalization of business processes and mission operations. Moreover, the use of architectures is required by the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 and by OMB.” See the full GAO report here.

DOT to take mission critical apps to the cloud: This week DOT announced that it is migrating mission-critical applications connected with the agency’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to the cloud. Apps to be moved to a cloud-based environment include FMCSA’s driving record database and related systems. These will be migrated to a FISMA-certified cloud data center run by Virtustream, which has partnered with OBXtek and MicroTech on the effort known as the Gateway Augmentation Project. Read more from GCN.

New report says $4.8 billion will be spent on cloud and related IT in next five years: A new report from Pike Research says spending by city governments who are under increasing pressure to do more with less, will cumulatively add up to nearly 5 billion between now and 2017. The majority of this is aimed at what the report terms smart technology, including cloud, data analytics, application development and related. See the full report here.

Cloud broker issue continues be debated: This week, Mike Hettinger, Director of the SIIA Public Sector Division was featured on In Depth with Francis Rose on Federal News Radio. The topic, what are cloud brokers and how would the concept work for the federal government? Here the interview here.


Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

Software Division CEO Insights: Jeremy Roche, FinancialForce.com

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

With various forces combining to transform the IT landscape, how do you see the role of the IT department evolving?

This year, a majority of cloud spending is coming from the corporate IT budget rather than business unit people buying SaaS on the side, which you saw in years past. More and more, FinancialForce.com is being introduced to customers by the IT department. A number of years ago, the IT group saw the cloud as a threat, but now IT actually sees the cloud as strategic and something that they can evolve around as well. They are clearly starting to embrace it. I see that there is a distinct move towards corporate budgets buying these cloud solutions now, not departmental budgets trying to work their way around IT departments. This starts to take us close to a tipping point, where people are using cloud technologies, not as a sideline, but as a mainstream part of their business. From an IT spending perspective, I suspect that we are going to see more spending on cloud technology and we’re going to see IT budgets increasingly allocated to it, rather than cloud expensed ad hoc against departmental budgets.

Social media and social business are big themes for 2012. In which areas of business will the social movement have the most impact (or most potential for impact)? Why?

Social media, enterprise social media in particular, is coming along at the right time. Companies today are increasingly leveraging virtual business models utilizing more subcontractors, home workers and geographically dispersed employees. Social media apps like Chatter do a great job of connecting people and the business information held in your business applications, regardless of where they sit in the world or where they sit on the organization chart.

That’s almost an expectation in something like the professional services space. I think this is why you will see professional services organizations lead in the adoption of social media in businesses. They have the killer use case for social media. They operate virtually and work in teams. In that business, your teams need to be in synch and collaborate in real time across sales, services and finance. The project work is social by nature, so the lines need to blur across teams and encompass the customer. We are very focused on this area and are delivering innovative applications to help our customers collaborate not just internally, but also collaborate more closely with their customers. For instance, FinancialForce.com’s professional services customers are using Chatter to follow project activity on a project wall, so that disparate teams can monitor a project’s progress and gain visibility to project management conversations.

When you think about it, most companies are working “socially” already, but they are doing it the hard way – conference calls, voice mail, IM and email. Worse, those conversations are all disconnected from core business systems, with no audit trail and no connection to customer or project data. It is difficult to run a virtual company this way. Companies are using really expensive, hardworking people to bridge the technological data gaps with phone calls.

So, I think we will see collaboration and social apps become even more mainstream inside companies in the coming years. I think business people had a hard time grasping why they would need Facebook or Twitter-like functions inside their companies. I fault the industry for selling it that way. Tools like Chatter are encouraging collaboration inside companies in ways we haven’t seen before and it is paying off in a big way. FinancialForce.com customers are breaking down the barriers between sales and accounting, for instance, to help collect cash and reduce bad debt as a team, and essentially providing a better service to their customers.

Does Mobile fall into one of your top 5 priorities for 2012? If so, how will you be attacking it? If not, why not?

Without question, mobile is now part of enterprise IT planning. Mobile devices will soon become a primary way people consume cloud applications. We’re going to see a lot more action around tablets with mobile applications and analysts predict that there will be more than 20 times the current amount of mobile cloud based applications by 2014. Technology is changing the way we socialize and the way we socialize is influencing the way we build and use technology. We have several apps on the drawing board for 2012, including some designed exclusively for senior managers and some for field employees, such as doing project time entry from your mobile phone.

As such, I see the conversations on cloud as a topic going down, and the conversations on mobile and social applications coming up, although the cloud is the enabler. There is much more to these applications than just being in the cloud in an IT sense – there is genuine business value in them and there are genuine ways for people to innovate.

Our customers may be visiting a client, for example, and want to know the current payment status before they walk into the meeting; or they may be on the road, but need access to the latest KPI’s and financial reports. FinancialForce Mobile leverages the Force.com mobile application platform, enabling customers to use a variety of mobile devices including Blackberries, iPhones and iPads to access financial and project data. Essentially, FinancialForce.com mobile applications enable customers to access accounting and project services information anytime, anywhere, boosting productivity and saving valuable time.


Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

Software Division CEO Insights: Jim Sheward, Fiberlink

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

With various forces combining to transform the IT landscape, how do you see the role of the IT department evolving?

The recent trends in consumerization and mobility are dramatically changing the role of IT. We’ve seen IT departments completely transform from dictating the technology employees can use to supporting more choices. Forrester recently cited in a report that almost 60% of firms surveyed already provide some support for employee-owned smartphones. Many companies are now adopting ‘bring your own device’ programs and this trend will continue across other areas of technology. CIOs are now facing a more sophisticated employee and an ever-increasing pace of change while losing control over the computing environment. The role of the IT organization is shifting from support and risk mitigation to one focused on competitiveness and employee return. At the forefront of this expanded role of IT will be developing an integrated strategy and operation that embraces employee use of personal devices, applications, and social media all within a constant mobile working mode.

Cloud computing is one of the fundamental building blocks for achieving this step function gain in productivity at a lower cost of operations. Today we see end-users and departments using software as a service (SaaS) and other cloud resources for a wide variety of applications, which dramatically changes the role of IT. In today’s mobile and Internet-driven world, consumers can easily access applications and use them on their own. The delivery model has changed but IT will still play an important role to ensure security, reliability, compliance, and integration.

Are traditional on-premise mega-vendors really committed to Cloud, or is it just a strategy to perpetuate and protect their on-premise legacy?

The shift to the Cloud will have an even more profound impact on the industry than the shift from mainframe to client-server. We saw what happened to some mega-vendors during that transition. And as more clients move from PCs to mobile devices, an even larger set of opportunities will emerge for new companies to solve new challenges. Today, any mega-vendor who is not committed to a Cloud strategy will probably not be a mega-vendor for much longer. Some have done a good job of transitioning their strategies and business models but it will be a difficult shift. Mega-vendors are highly dependent on their traditional on-premise revenue models of selling large upfront licenses and annual maintenance. This is one of the main reasons why some are more reluctant than others to commit fully to the Cloud. And any vendor trying to selling both approaches will probably have a hard time because they’ll need to spend additional resources on different versions of their products.

IT buyers have come to the realization that evaluating cloud services as a first choice is fiscally responsible and, in many cases, more secure and reliable than their own data centers. Companies now have a choice between server-based or cloud services for managing just about everything. The Cloud will be the only long term, sustainable way to deliver IT. The Cloud is real and it’s here to stay. With that said, a true commitment to the Cloud will require a focus on the real-time nature of business and agility of decision making and execution which has traditionally been difficult for some mega-vendors.

Given that the economic outlook in many parts of the world seems uncertain:

What’s your philosophy on maintaining a focus on innovation?

We have very talented and smart people in our company who are highly motivated to succeed. You really need to surround yourself with the best and brightest people. We like to describe our culture as ‘innovation angry.’ We’re always pushing to find better ways to deliver value to our customers. We have been very fortunate to be part of the two of the most innovative trends in the technology industry -­mobility and cloud computing. But that doesn’t mean innovation came easy to us. We allow our employees to take risks and make mistakes because we know this is ultimately how great innovations are born. It is important to look ahead and think about how the business world will work 3-5 years ahead and plan a corporate strategy accordingly.

How do you encourage and foster a growth mindset with your employees and partners?

As a global and diverse organization we’ve created teams that foster collaboration and take calculated risks. To inspire this type of thinking we provide meaningful rewards for those employees and partners that experiment and drive growth. It’s important for us to keep everyone involved in the direction of the company and empower them to make decisions. By enlisting their ideas and thoughts on how to grow the business we motivate them to be engaged in the process. Participation and accountability define their expectations. You also need people that are honest with each other about what’s working and what’s not, but who are also fun, hardworking, and want to win. Confidence and enthusiasm is infectious and as a leader, you need to set the tone.

What do you do as CEO to keep your organization focused on customers and value?

Expectations from customers on value and being responsive to their needs have changed dramatically. We operate in an instant-on world so we are working hard to build an active online community. This gives us a platform to constantly engage with customers, prospects and partners across multiple channels using forums, webinars, and blogs. The mobile IT world moves fast and change is constant. So the key here is to be available in real time to respond to customer input, questions, or problems. Our product is cloud based so we have the ability for customers to provide instant feedback and the capability for them to benchmark themselves against their peers across key mobility metrics. Fostering an empowered employee is important-ones that are able to respond quickly to the customer and educate are key to delivering value.


Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware