WT 360: The market from all angles

Each annual release of the Top 100 also provides a jumping-off point to start pondering what the next year’s rankings could look like and how today’s macrotrends shape it.

For this second part of their 2025 Top 100 conversation, Nick and Ross pick up where they left off by looking at the Trump administration’s spotlight and scrutiny of GovCon five months after moving in.

The government customer collective wants all the latest and gre...

Edition number 32 of the Washington Technology Top 100 rankings is now live for all to use in researching the federal market's largest technology and services contractors, and mapping the numbers to the industry’s macrotrends.

For this first in a two-part episode (the second goes out next week), Nick and Ross go over the companies and numbers that feature up and down the rankings’ 2025 edition.

Here is *some* of what was on their age...

The U.S. defense landscape has a few mainstays whose corporate headquarters are in another country and the reverse is very much true as well regardless of geopolitical and economic conditions.

But the ongoing tariff turbulence stemming from the Trump administration does pose questions about why international companies are still looking at the U.S. as a key market to grow their defense businesses.

Lauren Williams, a senior editor focu...

As Trump’s White House sees things, the General Services Administration should take on substantially all of the responsibility for managing the federal government’s acquisitions of goods and services.

Frank Konkel, editor-in-chief for GovExec’s publications including us, and WT’s editor Nick Wakeman broke the story on May 21 of how GSA is planning to absorb major IT contracts run by the National Institutes of Health and NASA.

That an...

Golden Dome is the U.S.’ newest ambitious attempt to create a multi-layered defense system for protecting the mainland from incoming ballistic, hypersonic, cruise and other types of missiles.

Audrey Decker, who covers the Air Force and Space Force for our partners at Defense One, has covered Golden Dome from multiple angles as ideas for it have emerged since President Trump’s January executive order to get working on it.

Audrey joins...

Specifics of what the structural changes to how the federal government buys goods and services for industry remain under construction, but companies now have some clear themes from that push to work into their strategies.

Tris Carpenter, general manager for strategic growth at Red Team Consulting, worked with his colleagues on an analysis of seven themes in particular that companies doing business with the government should look for...

The pace of change is accelerating in the market, which means we can always take a step back to understand where those changes have come from and how that drives business activities.

Bill Wright, head of global government affairs at Elastic, joins for this episode to explain how the fundamentals of the Trump administration’s approach to artificial intelligence and cybersecurity line up with those from the Biden Administration.

Yes ma...

In typical times, there is no going back after an agency tells a company their contract is being terminated for convenience of the government, which starts a settlement process cycle.

But this episode featuring Jeff Shapiro, government contracting advisory and regulatory assurance partner at CohnReznick, serves as a reminder that these are not typical times in GovCon.

As Shapiro explains to our Ross Wilkers, contractors have a Yes/No...

Google set off quite the reaction when the tech giant’s offer to discount its cloud-based productivity suite at 71% for all federal agencies was accepted by the General Services Administration, on behalf of those agencies.

Frank Konkel, editor-in-chief for all GovExec publications including WT, went under the hood of that agreement and joins our Ross Wilkers for this episode to take listeners there as well.

As Frank explains: this pa...

The nature of mergers and acquisitions in the government market is changing and our 2024 roundup of closed transactions further illustrates that evolution toward technology-enabled capabilities, which are largely driven by software.

Jean Stack and John Song, co-managing directors of the defense and government practice at the investment bank Baird & Co., join for this episode to discuss what drove transactions over the past year and ...

Public company acquirers (unicorns) certainly get everyone’s attention, but our 2024 M&A Roundup shows how the private equity collective continues to be the majority buyer and builder of midsized GovCon businesses over the years.

Greg Nossaman and Greg Woodford, co-founders and managing directors at their investment bank G Squared Capital Partners, join this episode to review PE’s past and present activity in the market.

The Gregs’ c...

Few companies have closed as many acquisitions as CACI International.

CACI has three acquisitions on our 2024 M&A Roundup: Azure Technologies, Applied Insight and Quandrint. Those moves brought to CACI a suite of offerings in cloud migration, radio frequency and electronic warfare, and digital application modernization.

In this episode, CACI's chief financial officer Jeff MacLauchlan explains how the company’s strategy focuses on gap...

In each year from 2004 and onward, WT publishes a report and augmenting analysis that catalogs merger-and-acquisition activity in the government market as a way to trace the history of GovCon and the companies in it.

Nick and Ross begin this two-folded episode by going over the 2024 edition of that report and their highlights from it, both in terms of what we can gauge about the individual companies and the overall market at-large.

P...

Even in a period of unprecedented change across the GovCon ecosystem, industry observers across-the-board remain certain that agencies and contractors alike will have more supply chain security requirements to navigate.

Leo Alvarez, a principal in Baker Tilly’s government contractor solutions practice, joins for this episode to go over the industrial side of that equation and how contractors can approach supply chain risk management...

Thales North America has a significant U.S. presence with thousands of employees and customers ranging from the Defense Department to NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration.

But the subsidiary has kept a relatively low-profile compared to competitors. For this episode, Editor Nick Wakeman sits down with Thales North America CEO Alan Pellegrini to talk strategy and tends in the market.

Item number one on the agenda is a discussi...

Private capital is a broad umbrella term for several different types of investment and ownership models in business, but private equity is the one that looms the largest over GovCon and tech-centric companies there.

Tiffanny Gates has a front row seat to that as an operating partner at Capitol Meridian Partners, an investor that touts itself as at the nexus of government and commercial markets. Gates joins our Ross Wilkers in this e...

When publicly traded companies release their financial results, the most interesting aspect of the conference calls have little to do with the numbers themselves and everything to do with trends across the market.

Luis Avila, a managing director in BDO’s technology and transformation practice, joins our Ross Wilkers for this episode that is also a note-swapping exercise of sorts. Both listened to the most recent round of GovCon inve...

It goes without saying that success in the government contracting ecosystem requires more than just having good methodologies and processes, both of which are significantly enhanced by strategy and knowledge.

Amber Hart and Lisa Shea Mundt, cofounders of The Pulse of GovCon, believe that taking a true “BD 360” approach to the market means enhancing all aspects of the federal sales process with the goal of achieving an intuitive unde...

Few doubt that quantum computing will have a tremendous impact on the tech world and beyond.

But as NextGovFCW's emerging technology reporter Alexandra Kelley explains in this episode, it is important to look beyond the buzzwords and assumptions.

"Alexa," as we and other GovExec colleagues call her, walks Editor Nick Wakeman through some common misconceptions that include why just using the term “quantum” is imprecise. Some active us...