At the recent Comstor Executive Federal Summit, leaders from SYNNEX, Comstor, and Cisco shared the latest fed IT trends with partners and VARS. Now in its 11th year, this event is designed to give partners face-to-face access to executives and learn about the programs that will help grow their federal business in 2020 and beyond.
“The reason we keep doing this event year after year is because it is an important time to gather with our Cisco team, Comstor team, and our reseller community to talk about topics that are important and current in the [federal] market,” Jay Denton, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Comstor North America, told us.
Carl De Groote, Vice President of U.S. Federal at Cisco, presented at the event and shared his insight into how Cisco will continue to transform and deliver powerful technology and platforms to enable passionate civil servants to deliver on their mission. De Groote said that modernization is becoming platform-centric, that edge compute will “eat” the cloud, and that the government needs access to leverageable real-time data.
“The Cisco focus is to help customers transform by working with partners to deliver the technology and the platforms to help passionate civil servants deliver on their mission,” De Groote shared.
He went on to share insights into technology, saying “What does that mean to be in a platform-centric world? Winner takes all.”
Since the industry has become more services focused, it is imperative that platform support is available.
“A platform, by definition, is anything you run your business or mission on. Some of us are on iPhone, some of us on another type of phone, but we’re all well-connected. Like in the consumer world, the next generation of consumption is tipping to mission,” De Groote continued.
“Government customers today want to know how they can create capabilities on platforms that they can deliver to their constituent base,” De Groote shared.
Another fed IT trend that the government is focused on today is real-time access to data. “Once they’re able to collect it and organize it, then they have to crunch through it. Maintaining supremacy in a contested area is the ability to turn data into information faster than your adversary can,” he explained.
Real-time data is essentially important in today’s tech environments, as is, according to De Groote, edge computing. He explained that the edge is going to “eat” cloud eventually, much like services have overtaken software.
“More data resides at the edge than actually resides in the data center or in the cloud today. So, we are focused on this opportunity to drive data modeling and other areas,” he said.
In his closing, De Groote shared that when Cisco and its partners bring the power of innovation, know-how, speed, technology, and platforms to a problem set that the government is trying to solve, it’s transformational. Today’s federal customers have re-platformed and want quick capabilities that are delivered as a service. As De Groote said, the gains for customer success reside in how seamless our platforms and technologies come into the agency and when the technology “fades into the background, and you’re seeing the capabilities. That’s pretty powerful when it happens.”
