WT 360: The market from all angles

In his first year as CEO, Ron Ash of Accenture Federal Services has been positioning the company for growth opportunities that focus on Trump administration priorities for artificial intelligence and other technologies that foster efficiency. 

Ash tells our Nick Wakeman about how these changes in the market have impacted partnerships, fostered new business models and brought more commercial practices into the federal market.

He calls...

Needless to say, the 2025 presidential transition has put technology higher on the agenda when talking about the business of government and how those tools can be a lever for changing how agencies operate.

David Birken, senior vice president for digital modernization and experience at ICF, joins for this episode to explain how federal tech modernization has been a long-term growth priority for the company and some fundamentals that ...

Government contractors struggle with exit and succession planning for multiple reasons, while the majority of transaction activity in the market these days has some level of private equity involvement on either side.

But companies that want to remain independent, the employee stock ownership plan can be an alternative transaction that creates liquidity and incentives for the shareholders.

David Blauzvern, a managing director at CSG P...

For technology startups, the closure of an external investment round should be considered only the beginning of a new cycle in their strategies to grow the business and accelerate adoption of their products.

Michael Hauser, managing partner for Science Applications International Corp.’s venture capital arm, joins for this episode to explain how SAIC Ventures works with startups after investing in them to bring their technologies int...

Every founder of a company faces this quandary: What does our next phase look like? How do we get there? Who can help us get there?

Sophia Harris and her leadership team at ODRG, which she founded in 2013, faced those questions head-on as they plotted out the company’s next steps and that led them to partnering with Advantage Capital.

This episode begins with Harris telling our Ross Wilkers the full story of ODRG’s hard pivot to bein...

Reindustrialization is a catch-all description of moves by government and industry to reinvigorate domestic manufacturing amid other countries’ investments on that front, especially China.

Lauren Williams, our Defense One colleague and a senior editor there, joins our Ross Wilkers for this episode to explore how the industry they cover is a part of that larger push to build more systems in America and use new advanced technology to ...

Uber is the newest example of a consumer technology company entering into a government-wide arrangement with the General Services Administration, which negotiated the pact on behalf of every federal agency.

Frank Konkel, editor-in-chief for all GovExec publications including WT, joins for this episode to break down the finer details of that agreement and how contractors are a part of it too. Then there is the bigger picture theme fo...

Government contractors are under a different sort of microscope for not just how they do their work supporting agencies’ missions, but also how they talk about themselves out in the public.

The direct connections between external messaging and communications with government customers are the focal point of this episode featuring Dustin Siggins, founder of Proven Media Solutions, and Mild Red CEO Katie Helwig.

Compliance remains core ...

Companies in the government market have to make big “Sliding Doors”-type decisions all the time on which paths to choose for themselves and those to turn away from.

Aaron Myers works with contractors in those situations as a partner for aerospace, defense and government advisory at Aprio. He joins our Ross Wilkers for this episode to provide key questions for them to answer when it is time to make important choices.

Delivery models, ...

Iran is known to be one of the world’s major nation-state actors in cyberspace and that fact has returned to the forefront since its war with Israel started on June 13.

David DiMolfetta, who covers cyber for our partner publication Nextgov/FCW, joins for this episode to break down how Iran typically operates in cyber and what U.S. government agencies are watching out for as the conflict continues.

The defense industrial base is also ...

The Veterans Affairs Department is coming under heightened scrutiny after it emerged that artificial intelligence likely played a role in VA’s decisions on which contracts to cut as part of the Trump administration’s purported efficiency push.

Edward Graham, who covers VA for our partner publication Nextgov/FCW, joins for this episode to break down what is known so far about VA’s use of AI in that process and efforts to get more tra...

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...