The same themes are coming through: the importance of being able to consume technological innovation in utility and consumption models.
Tony Celeste
Executive Director and General Manager for Public Sector, Ingram Micro
Ingram Micro
The rush is on: What’s the focus of federal year-end IT buying in 2022?
The buying season is in full swing, and agencies are feeling pressure because the fiscal 2022 budget wasn’t passed until mid-March. We talk to industry tech...
The ability to extract actionable intelligence from the edge is critical. Regional Sales Director - Dell Federal Channel and Distribution, Dell Technologies
Lisa Ortiz
This is the second article in our series, The Power of Technology.
No doubt, there will be an emphasis on finalizing technology buys over the next month as the government closes in on the end of fiscal 2022.
With the 2022 continuing resolution, “the federal spending bill wasn’t passed until March 10 this year. It takes about 90 days from there for those monies to start flowing to agencies,” said Tony Celeste, executive director and general manager for public sector at Ingram Micro.
Given that CR reality, “I would say agencies right now are feeling the pressure,” said Celeste, who spoke with Federal News Network for The Power of Technology series.
What’s more, agencies continue to struggle with supply chain delays created by the COVID-19 pandemic, along with rapid policy changes around telework and remote work, which have led to an exponential increase in the use of mobile devices, Celeste added. “That’s resulted in network bandwidth and security challenges as the attack surface has grown and ring-fenced operations are no longer viable,” he said.
The result? Zero trust security, hybrid cloud and 5G have become critical priorities, and agencies are taking steps to have multiple sources for solutions during the busy, end-of-year buying season, Celeste said.
Playing pandemic catchup on federal IT
Dell Technologies’ Lisa Ortiz seconded that. “What we’re seeing is the government is focused a lot around multicloud, edge and security,” said Ortiz, regional sales director for Dell federal channel and distribution.
Typically, agencies operate in at least two public clouds and possibly a private cloud while also maintaining some on-premise infrastructure too, she said. The focus for most IT organizations then is increasingly on developing strategies to better run workloads, reduce costs and optimize performance — and to evolve their cloud use relative to mission.
“In addition to that, we’re seeing the emergence of edge workloads. Gartner said that they predict over 70% of that new data will be created by the year 2025,” Ortiz said.
The government is no exception. As data proliferates at the edge, Dell sees agencies asking for help with deploying solutions and compute power to support the artificial intelligence and machine language processing necessary to reduce the amount of data that must be transmitted over the network.
“The ability to extract actionable intelligence from the edge is critical,” Ortiz said.
Seeking tech for now and the future
Cloud at the edge is an area where Dell is investing to help agencies. One example she offered was through the use of digital and virtual twins, “where you simulate a twin model to have insights and enable decision-making in real time. We have a whole workstream and a group that works around that.”
That can help agencies be more agile and respond to what’s happening in real-world scenarios, like disaster response and on the battlefield, Celeste said.
Even as agencies are focused on immediate needs, such as cloud to the edge and cybersecurity, initiatives like those involving digital twins show that even during the busy season agencies are thinking about the future, he added. And cloud is becoming the go-to enabler, Celeste said, noting that when he’s at events and conferences, “the same themes are coming through: the importance of being able to consume technological innovation in utility and consumption models.”
In part, that’s driven by budget realities for agencies, he said, because 75% to 80% of most federal budgets go straight to maintaining operations. That leaves little room for transformative technology initiatives, Celeste said. With cloud, there’s flexibility in managing data workloads and services, which gives agencies the ability to stretch their budgets further, he said.
Helping agencies throughout the federal buying season
As agencies push forward on these efforts and try to lock in purchases before the end of the fiscal year, Dell and Ingram Micro are partnering to make last-minute buys as quick and easy as possible, Ortiz and Celeste said.
For starters, both companies have extended hours, with people available on the phone to help address questions, along with human and automated tools to manage orders.
Agency callers are “routed to subject matter experts that work on federal government requirements every day, not just once in a while,” Celeste said, which should speed getting to the right answer.
Additionally, Ortiz said that Dell Technologies works closely with partners like Ingram Micro during the buying season to ensure it has packaged solutions ready to ship directly to agencies when they do get their allocations. It’s one of the ways that Ingram Micro helps mediate supply chain issues, Celeste added.
Dell also makes its APEX cloud offering available through its partners, Ortiz said.
“It’s a consistent cloud experience, delivered as a service,” that lets organizations scale on demand and pay as they go, she said. “When you do a financial model like that, it enables them to purchase all the things that they need, including the cyber and applications.”
To read more articles in The Power of Technology series, click here.
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