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On of the weirder federal IT developments of recent years is how slowly agencies are using a governmentwide telecom contract that’s supposed to be mandatory. It’s the Enterprise Information Solutions multiple-award program operated by the General Services Administration. For some facts and figures, and why this might be happening, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin turned to federal sales and marketing consultant Larry Allen.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: I think one of the most interesting statistics you cite compiled by Bloomberg is how popular the old program that EIS is supposed to replace still is.

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Larry Allen: Tom, that’s exactly right. Looking at the numbers, for fiscal year 2021, the network’s contract which is done and finished, and EIS is replacing it, networks did 86% of the amount of business that EIS did so there was really only a very little difference between EIS and networks in terms of total business in FY 21. That shows that it remained a popular contract. Now, I think the authority to keep extending business out for networks is going to go away. But clearly agencies and contractors, frankly, are looking at networks and saying, in today’s environment, when we can’t really invest in new technology, and Congress isn’t giving us funds to start something new, we’re gonna go with what we know. And what we know, is networks.

Tom Temin: Well, yes, Congress may not be giving new money, or they may not all have access to the technology modernization fund, but IT is still $100 billion tab for the government. So there’s money for a lot of stuff.

Larry Allen: Not only, Tom, is there money to do this in the budget. Congress has also directed federal agencies to transition away from networks. It’s one of the evaluation points in the FITARA scorecard. The scorecard most recent one just came out about a week or so ago. And the area where agencies got the lowest grades across the board was in FITARA. Transition was in he is transitioning. This shows that agencies just are really resistant to move to EIS, despite congressional oversight and recommendations that they do so. Despite the carrot and stick approach that GSA is taking in encouraging agencies to transition. It’s a conundrum. And in the meantime, contractors that bid on EIS and have this contract must be wondering, what do I have to do to recoup the millions of dollars in bidding proposal costs that I have sunk to getting EIS in the first place so that I can actually begin to make a profit here.

Tom Temin: Isn’t this similar, though, to the phenomenon we saw when networks itself was established? And it was kind of confusing, they had a universal version and a some other kind of version, enterprise version. And nobody understood the difference between the two. And that was replacing I think, one of the old FTS contracts, and that took several years of transition.

Larry Allen: Right. So what you’re saying, Tom, is exactly right. We’ve seen from FTS 2001, to networks, a slow transition. Congress had to get involved in that time and really put the hammer down on agencies and then from networks to EIS we’ve seen a problem, what I would say, while the problem of transition itself has been similar from contract to contract, I’ve seen it getting progressively slower over time. And I think that calls into question about the viability of a large standalone telecommunications contract in the federal market. Agencies obviously aren’t wild about having to spend money to upgrade their systems, even though their security benefits, functionality benefits, a whole slew of things they get from doing the upgrade. But they’re just not doing it, at least they’re not doing it very quickly. And every time GSA puts a new telecom contract into place, it’s getting slower and slower to kick over to the new contract. I just wonder whether or not we’ve seen the end of large telecommunications contracts in government, and the time for agencies to go out and maybe do their own thing, according to their own needs.

Tom Temin: While also true is the fact that agencies feel that they can give better client customer service by upgrading their applications online and fixing their software. And that’s not exactly, so it’s not strictly necessary to upgrade the network to deliver better service, if you have better applications and better software.

Larry Allen: Well, you’ve hit on something major here, Tom, and that is the change in technology and the change in how federal agencies use that technology. We don’t really use our phones as much in the conduct of government business these days. A lot of that has been driven by the pandemic, but I’m not sure that even were the pandemic to vanish overnight that everybody would go back to using their phones and telecommunications devices the way they did three years ago. The number of Zoom calls we do every day, the number of other calls on similar platforms that we do every day. These have generally replaced conference calls, phone calls, things that measure. If agency officials are using a phone, it’s more frequently going to be their official cell phone, particularly if they’re working remotely as so many of them continue to do. So the reality of how people use telecommunication services changed right at the exact time that EIS came online. And that’s another thing that I think is driving slow transition; agencies are upgrading their it but they’re upgrading their it to use software-based telecommunications platforms that really aren’t part of the EIS contract.

Tom Temin: I guess what we need next is push-to-talk for Zoom, and then you’d really have something. We’re speaking with Larry Allen, president of Allen Federal Business Partners. You’re also writing that the change to zero trust architecture and the latest detailed strategy on that from the Biden administration is a business opportunity. And explain how, because the first thing people always say is what you can’t buy zero trust. It’s something you architect and design. So therefore, it’s not a product, there’s no zero trust in a blue or red box.

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Larry Allen: There’s no box for zero trust, Tom. But I think increasingly, federal contractors are going to have to show how the solutions that they’re proposing are zero trust-based. Look at this, really, as a step forward, from what we saw with the cloud, when cloud first came in the federal market. Suddenly, everybody had to have a cloud solution. All cloud solutions look different from each other, particularly in the early days. Then we got FedRAMP, to make sure that everybody offering cloud had a common set of standards they had to meet. I kind of look at the zero trust memorandum as a step in the direction of what agencies are going to be requiring of themselves, and then by extension, requiring of their contractors in order to meet the administration’s mandates.

While you’re not going to see something that says this is a zero trust acquisition, you’re going to see it, I think, become an identifiable spend area. IT solutions with zero trust characteristics baked in. For contractors, I think that means it’s an opportunity to show what they have in terms of these types of solutions. But it’s also a challenge. If, for whatever reason, your company has been slow to the zero trust game, this is a heads up for you that at least in terms of federal business, you better understand what this is, you better understand what is required of you and what your competitors are doing. One federal agency just released a small but discrete zero trust pilot program, immediately before the White House administration announcement came out. And it was called a zero trust pilot award. I think we’re gonna see a lot more zero trust labeled awards, regardless of what they might have under the hood. This is how they’re going to be classified. And we’re going to start seeing zero trust spending tracked, at least by industry, if not officially by government.

Tom Temin: So are you saying GSA should rename EIS as zero trust?

Larry Allen: Well, certainly that would let them in with the hot thing of the day.

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