KCAA: Inside Analysis with Eric Kavanagh (Sun, 2 Feb, 2025)

KCAA: Inside Analysis with Eric Kavanagh on Sun, 2 Feb, 2025

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Information economy as a rid. The world is teeming with

(00:03):
innovation as new business models reinvent every industry industry. Inside
Analysis is your source of information and insight about how
to make the most of this exciting new era. Learn
more at inside analysis dot Comsideanalysis dot com. And now
here's your host, Eric Kavanaugh.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Fare Well. All right, ladies and gentlemen, Hello and welcome
back once again to the only coast to coast radio show.
And that's all about the information economy. It's called Inside Analysis.
You're true the Eric Kavanaugh is here, and folks, I'm
very pleased to be talking about a very serious subject
today that is hiring in the federal government. We have
Chris Collegato today with us and he is from Fedstack

(00:46):
and they're focused intently on this very challenge. And Chris,
there are lots of things that need to get done
in DC, as we all know, and you folks are
out there helping to make these connections. Tell us quickly
about Fedstack, what you guys were build for and what
you're working on today.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Sure, thanks, Eric, so very quick on. Fedstack is actually
a new brand very focused on the federal.

Speaker 4 (01:12):
Market.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
In fact, we are basically a unit that was born
out of a workforce development organization called smooth Stack. So
this is actually a brand launch where we're actually expanding
our offering from what we're pretty well known to.

Speaker 4 (01:26):
Have been doing in the market space until now.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
So our focus has been how do we basically close
in on the skills gap specific to technology. Right, there's
a lot of difficulty in hiring also in the federal space.
There's also a lot of competition in the open market
for pretty much the same pool of resources. So where
we differentiate ourselves is we're actually what we were calling

(01:53):
it creation of net new talent. Right. What that means
is we actually develop the talent from sources where you
would not usually find them, right, So a lot of
new entrants into the technology market that have the high
aptitude for grasping new technology, exiting military that would like

(02:16):
to break into the technology field. Basically, we created an
accelerated apprenticeship program where we are secret sauces being an
immersive environment where we mirror the target environment for our clients,
be that direct to the government or some of our
system integrated partners where they're trying to meet a particular requirement.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah, So the new training where it is intensive training,
and I'm presuming what you're doing is mimicking the work
environment where they'll be so they work with the technologies
that they'll need to be working with in the actual job.

Speaker 5 (02:52):
Is that right?

Speaker 4 (02:53):
That's correct.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
So we actually have a patent pending on this technology
for called mirror environment, right. So beyond just training them
on the content, right, we really tailored the curriculum specific.

Speaker 4 (03:08):
To that job.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
Right, So it's not just about training on one dimension,
but really the full breadth of skill sets that's required
to deliver the job for day one, right, So whether
that's cloud, whether that's actual programming or even consulting skills
and knowledge of the domain where they're going to be deployed.
So we really tailored the environment specific to the requirement

(03:32):
and then basically run them through anywhere from a ten
to twelve week window against a full time, full time
absorption of the material where we provide all the lab
environments set up for that the trainers, the product owners
mimicking and simulating what they would face when they actually

(03:53):
work on day one.

Speaker 5 (03:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
Well, and there's lots of new technology to learn these days. Obviously,
artificial intelligence is very much top of mind.

Speaker 5 (04:02):
For people. You have models that.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Need to be designed, they need to be trained. You've
got AI infrastructure to worry about. Do you cover that
whole spectrum everything from the IT infrastructure to the model design,
the training, all that kind of fun stuff.

Speaker 4 (04:17):
Oh, absolutely right.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
So we will focus on what is in need today
and we actually continue to continue to scan the market
of what's emerging. So we want to be able to
stay ahead of what's coming. So we focus on.

Speaker 4 (04:31):
Five key areas, right, data and AI.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Right, So a lot of the data engineering, big data,
analytics and so on, a lot of the new AI
models are coming out there, the traditional applications development, regardless
of what stack that may be.

Speaker 4 (04:47):
And then digital platforms.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
There's a lot of COTS packages, ERP packages for example,
lo code, no code, type of technologies uh, including infrastructure solutions,
cloud hybrid, and so on, including the way we do
DevOps for deployment and packaging all that into those target environment.
And finally, of course across the board, you need to
have cybersecurity for secure applications and platforms.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
Yeah, cybersecurity, I mean there's a space that will never
ever ever go away. It's harder than ever, but you
do have better tools than ever too, So how do
you yourselves keep on top of the latest technologies? Do
you hire consultants and practitioners from these environments. Let's just
pick cybersecurity as one because it's its own entity. Do

(05:32):
you go out and get folks from the big firms
to come on and be your trainers and your consultants?

Speaker 5 (05:38):
How does that work?

Speaker 3 (05:39):
So we have a pretty large partner network, So we
partner both from a strategic alliance with the vendor providers
for example. So we create those partnerships where we are
basically seen as workforce providers and then we basically look
at those trainers or the ex experts from the various

(06:01):
fields that we're trying to surface. Right So, in fact, Ashla,
that's a good segue into the expansion of our offerings
beyond creating this apprenticeship cohorts, where we're now actually extending
our services to our partners where some of the folks
that they have that may have been working on the
same maybe legacy applications that now have to transition to

(06:24):
the modern technology as new platforms get rolled out, they
need to be able to keep pace with that, so
we bring in the trainers that will help the transition
from legacy to modern digital platforms.

Speaker 5 (06:38):
And there are lots and lots of new platforms.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
You mentioned low code, no code, that's been a very
hot topic the last few years, where you just have
a nice graphical user interface and it's typically a drag
and drop where you pull together different components and under
the covers they handle all the code development, all the
code execution.

Speaker 5 (06:58):
Right.

Speaker 3 (06:59):
Absolutely, there's some exciting things that actually beyond the local
no code now with AI, right, AI itself is actually
needs to work together with the folks that were training
because you're no longer just training them the basics of programming,
but how to actually program with.

Speaker 4 (07:17):
AI as an assistant.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
So it's a little bit of a new game, right,
It's almost a game changer where you know, one person
needed to learn the very basic coding principles. Now you're
doing local no code and reuse, dropping and dropping gugi
on top of the thing, and now AI itself you
give them a prompt and it's writing a lot of
the code for you. So being able to live in

(07:39):
that environment that the expectation is really accelerated outcomes.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yeah, and of course jen ai is very hot these days.
But the problem with Jenais you probably know is that
it is probabilistic, so it's not deterministic. I think that's
one reason why you see so much emphasis on the copilots,
on the helpers, the digital assistance, because the human can
then still make a judgment about what to do. You're
not just turning the genai and letting it do the job.

(08:06):
Is that your impression as well?

Speaker 4 (08:07):
That absolutely?

Speaker 3 (08:10):
Oh absolutely, I think a lot of this hallucinations happen
right with some of the It depends on what you
use for training the models, So you know, part of
the decision making would be when do you point Copilot
or others into like external resources where it can be
corrupted by a lot of the unvetted information that that's

(08:31):
being formed to form your answers versus trusted sources for
training in house. Potentially that would allow actually more reliable answers.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
And you know, one of the technologies that fascinates me
the most, and I'm curious to know if you've heard
about this process mining companies like Salonis Software a G.
There's a few of them out there where you track
typically the digital data footprints through various information systems to
see what's actually happening to me, that is an incredibly
powerful technology for rewriting, reinventing information systems to kind of

(09:05):
catapult them into the modern age.

Speaker 4 (09:07):
What do you think, Well, absolutely, I think that that
saves a lot of time.

Speaker 6 (09:11):
Right.

Speaker 3 (09:12):
You know, you've done a lot of methods in the past,
the reverse engineering, and this really helps a lot, especially
when you're doing modernization, right. It takes a lot of
time to try and trace and ensure that you're able
to keep the functions that you want to keep and
how to design for the future, and something like this
really accelerates that analysis.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, and open source is a big deal too. Open source,
I think has revolutionized the information technology landscape, certainly on
the app development side, I mean all the way down
to Linux and the Linux kernel and the work that's
being done there, but the entire data stack now has
been opening up to open source technology. Are there concerns
in federal use cases for open source because the source

(09:55):
is open?

Speaker 5 (09:56):
What do you think about all that?

Speaker 3 (09:57):
I think in the early days that been a lot
of concern But there's like two thoughts on that, right,
there's still a lot of folks that kind of want
to look at closed systems but what we're finding out
is a lot of folks say, hey, because it's an
open system, it's been tested more thoroughly than any closed
system that's out there, that they may actually renders them

(10:18):
more secure. You know, I could go both ways on
that one, but it really depends on how sensitive the
systems you're developing and how you know whether you are
exposing vulnerability in an open setting, or it's a mature
enough platform that's been really thoroughly tested that makes it trustable.

(10:39):
Like Linux, you know, was in the same boat at
some point, and now it's all over the place.

Speaker 5 (10:44):
Right now, and now it's the enterprise standard for sure.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
Absolutely, and we all keep hearing about this it skills shortage,
and you know, I don't really know what to make
of it all. There are lots of people, I'm sure,
who want to learn all those things, and you're filling
that gap, right, I mean, you are training and retraining
people to learn how to use all the new technologies.
And you know, the fun part is that Jennai can

(11:06):
be a big part of that, right. You can load
instruction manuals into a GENEI solution and then just ask
it all kinds of questions in that environment. It seems
to me they're very, very powerful and very effective. They
don't hallucinate as much because they're just pointed at a
particular document. Is that what you found as well, that
JENNI can be a very powerful copilot in helping to

(11:27):
train people to use new technology.

Speaker 7 (11:29):
Well.

Speaker 3 (11:30):
Absolutely, And I think a lot of the younger generation
factor growing up with GENAI access already, right, So we
have to adopt our training mechanisms and methods in order
to incorporate that in the learning management systems that we
actually have ourselves in house, and so we need to
constantly look for new ways of actually training. As you know,

(11:53):
we're trying to train and rescale some of the folks
that are more used to the older technologies, and then
you have the the folks are new, younger generation are
upcoming that expect that this is the way they want
to learn in the future. So we're trying to have
that happy medium. But the future really is everything is
going to be gen AI or agenta AI assistant.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah, and that actually brings up a really good point.
I'd be curious to get your thoughts as a trainer,
as someone who is working for a company that trains people.
We now have arguably five generations in the workforce with
very different cultural norms, very different tendencies and more rays.

Speaker 5 (12:33):
How do you tackle that.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
Do you actually address that programmatically to treat people of
a certain age one way and people of a certain
age a little bit different just because of their cultural diversity,
or how does that actually work?

Speaker 3 (12:45):
Yeah, we absolutely need to consider that, right, So when
we're build out some cohorts in the screening process, as
we are customizing the curriculum, that's part of the consideration.
What is the makeup of that cohort for example, Well,
if that's a mix of all five generations, you've got
to be able to cater to what's the most effective
technique and I just deliver the content material in a

(13:09):
one size fits all manner.

Speaker 5 (13:11):
Yeah, that's interesting too.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
So you know, maybe you could share with our audience
a bit how you track those kinds of things, the
techniques that you use, which sessions you have people joined
to train, and then the efficacy of that down the road.
I mean, I know fed stack is new, but from
your smooth Stack experience, for example, how much are you
able to track, measure, and then ascertain the efficacy of

(13:35):
certain programs to certain demographics and then monitor it and
modify that over time.

Speaker 3 (13:40):
Yeah, so that's actually a really good question because that's
the reason why we actually came up with our own
learning management system to be able to track everything.

Speaker 8 (13:49):
Right.

Speaker 3 (13:50):
So when you look at a ten to twelve week
process and cohort, every week is basically an evaluation where
actually the progress of the entire class comes in, right,
So we're trying to develop a cohort. In fact, it's
no guarantee that they're actually going to graduate, right, So
the efficacy of how we teach that is very important,

(14:10):
but also the evaluation factors because we're very selective on
the folks that we deploy out there for contracts, so
we may start up with a very large number, but
by the time we're finish and only the stream of
the crop actually surfaces at the end.

Speaker 4 (14:27):
So we're a heavier aligned of metrics.

Speaker 3 (14:30):
And even after the courses are done, we do checkpoints,
right the first thirty days, the first sixty days, what's
your feedback of what would you rather us have done.
Now that you actually have experience in working this and
applying this on your current project, then we use that
for the training of the next cohort in order to
improve it.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
That's very impressive. You developed your own learning management system.
If you sometimes you got to roll your own right.
You have to figure out what you need done, what
functionality you need baked into this system, and if you're
a large enough organization, sometimes it makes sense to just
build out your own system.

Speaker 5 (15:08):
That's that's pretty impressive.

Speaker 2 (15:09):
So I'm guessing you had some experience with learning management
systems and you're like, you know what, we got to
really roll up our sleeves and build this one out ourselves.

Speaker 5 (15:16):
How long did that take? Roughly? Do you know?

Speaker 3 (15:18):
Well, it's actually born out of necessity. So when we
the organization started a smooth Stack, you know, five six
years ago, it was an in person learning. We actually
bring our students here, put them in apartments, and we
have a whole training facility in house. When COVID hit,
everything had to go to virtual and we had to

(15:39):
rapidly come up with a way to be able to
deliver those same, you know, quality programs in a virtual manner.

Speaker 4 (15:46):
And that's what actually.

Speaker 3 (15:47):
Prompted us to say, hey, we really need to create
our own learning management system in order to deliver what
we're able to deliver in an in person manner.

Speaker 5 (15:57):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah, COVID was quite the forcing function, right to use
a technology term, It really forced us all to take
a very hard look at processes, workflows, access to data,
access to information systems, and security.

Speaker 5 (16:14):
For goodness sakes.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
I mean, with everybody working from home now, your threat
scape is much larger because you have all these all
these devices everywhere, computers that are outside of your data center,
phones that are outside of your purview at least you know,
in the in the corporate office, et cetera. So that
was a real wake up call for you guys that
you had to go and reevaluate and redesign how you

(16:36):
do these things.

Speaker 4 (16:37):
Right, absolutely, absolutely.

Speaker 5 (16:39):
Yeah, that's that's pretty impressive. And let's get into in
the next segment.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
We'll get a bit deeper into the cybersecurity side, just
because that is so important and I happen to know
from experience that cybersecurity is a constantly evolving, constantly changing
environment and to stay on top of things you need
to do. Of course, all the basics, password management things
of this nature. Biometrics of course are really coming into

(17:03):
play these days. But you need to be monitoring the network.
You need to be monitoring the apps, you need to
be monitoring the behaviors of all these people. And there
are hundreds and hundreds of security solutions you can use.
Some like I suggest that focus on the network, some
focus on the apps, some focus on the users and
kind of watching, and some take a more holistic approach.

(17:24):
And of course, with machine learning you can track these
things more and more assiduously over time. So when we
come back from the break, we'll be talking again to
Chris Coligado. He is with fed Stack. This is a
new brand that's coming out of the smooth Stack organization
that's been around for a while. They do it services, consulting, training,
helping people learn how to do the jobs of the future,

(17:45):
which are you know, it's the jobs of today, right
staying on top of these systems and keeping them safe.
Because if the government isn't safe, who is safe? Well, folks,
don't touch that. Delby right back. You're listening to Inside Analysis.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
Welcome back to Inside Analysis. Here's your host, Eric Tabanac.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
All right, folks back here on Inside Analysis talking to
Chris Coligato of fed Stack. This is a new brand
that's coming out of smooth Stack and Chris in the
last segment you were talking about how COVID was a
forcing function. COVID kind of woke all of us up
in lots of different ways, and we had to pay
close attention to what we're doing. You have to create

(18:32):
these immersive experiences for people. So I guess one question
I'll ask you is VR. Are you using virtual reality
for any of this training.

Speaker 3 (18:41):
We're starting to use VR in certain segments, especially in
the enterprise side of things, because some of the clients
are actually in the virtual reality environment. So we're experimenting
a little bit of that, right, But again it goes
back to learning learning preferences.

Speaker 4 (18:57):
So you know, if.

Speaker 3 (18:58):
We are looking at a cohort where they're really receptive
to virtual reality, augmented reality type of learning process, we'll
shore you'll surely explore that. Uh so far, it hasn't
been much demand for that type of immersion levels, but
something that they were definitely open to.

Speaker 5 (19:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Well, let's let's dig back into the cybersecurity. I mean,
how how do you stay on top of all the
latest do you interface with companies like splunk or uh
Solar Winds. Of course, they had their experience with being
hacked themselves, which I thought was one of the craziest hacks.
I mean, we've seen some really some bad hacks lately.

(19:41):
Snowflake was hacked, a lot of customer data was stolen.
How do you guys stay on top of the security
space to make sure that you are training people for
this new generation of technologies?

Speaker 3 (19:51):
So yeah, it goes you know, I actually just brought
in one of our cybersecurity UH experts is going to
be leading that US for our Tier one to consult arena.
But you know, so far, we've been basically working our network,
whether it's a product based you know, as you mentioned
all all those things that you mentioned earlier, some of

(20:12):
the product vendors but also even some of the training
vendors that are out there, they're already delivering these types
of methodologies in the defense and intel spaces. We keep
track of that and we create a partnerships on how
to actually develop the curriculum together. You know, they usually
deliver a lot of these things either in a just

(20:35):
urst of content more of a boot camp style content push,
and some of them are very focused just on the
certification side of it. That's when we're actually enriching a
lot of the existing programs that are out there through
our mirrored environment immersion that's kind of new. So we're
partnering with a lot of the players out there, both
product and trainers themselves, in order to deliver a differentiated offering.

Speaker 5 (21:00):
Yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 2 (21:01):
And now do you also when you do this training
and you follow all the way through, so you're helping
folks get jobs at these organizations.

Speaker 5 (21:09):
And your clients. Is it any number of agencies?

Speaker 2 (21:11):
Are there specific agencies that you represent or is there
a particular focus or one of the agencies that works
with you the most, or tell me about that for
a minute.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
So we don't currently have any prime contract vehicles, which
is one of the key things that I'm looking to explore,
hence the expansion of our services to full technology consulting.

Speaker 8 (21:34):
Right.

Speaker 3 (21:35):
So a lot of our delivery is through our partners,
Like our customers are basically your large systems integrators that
are mid tiers and then basically they serve they serve
the government and a lot of these contracts, right, So
you look at some of the lart and you can
name you know, you know, anyone out there that's serving
the federal government.

Speaker 4 (21:55):
They need to ramp up very quickly, right, And a lot.

Speaker 3 (21:58):
Of cases they would say, hey, I need somebody who
knows Java, and they'll go in there and test it out,
but they don't know the other eighty percent of the
stack that's going to be required for that piece.

Speaker 4 (22:09):
Right.

Speaker 3 (22:10):
That's where we come in and say, well, instead of
piecemealing how you bring your talent in, you can get
a cohort of ten that could function equivalent to cohort
of twenty when you're trying to piecemeal the talent that
you're trying to put together. We will put the talent
together for you, fat in a very fast method, in
a cost effective way. We're actually, i would say we're

(22:33):
the greening strategy for a lot of the sis because
we are actually creating this new talent pool for very
affordable resources because a lot of them are just coming
out of college, coming out of former military breaking in.
But what they're finding out is the folks that graduate
from our programs are equivalent to somebody that they can
come out of the street with two to three years

(22:55):
level of experience already that level of equivalency. So it's
become a very very strong value proposition for us, both
from the cost perspective, and then the upfront cost is
all the risk is on us. We provide a training
these are paid apprenticeships right well, they're on our books,
and then when we deploy them to our partners, that's
where they actually had their consulting experience and build out.

(23:19):
So that's kind of like a win win situation between
us and our partners. At the same time that we're
going directly to the government. Our strategy now is the
you know, starting to now that we have our brand
a little bit of recognitions now and about ten different
agencies at this point through our partners, is to start
looking at being a small business going directly to the

(23:40):
government and actually offering these services directly.

Speaker 5 (23:45):
Yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
You know, I was speaking with a gentleman named Alvin
fu who is quite a prominent thought leader on LinkedIn.

Speaker 5 (23:51):
He's got hundreds of thousands.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
Of followers, he's all over the world, and we were
talking about artificial intelligence, and he made a very interesting
point the other day on this very show.

Speaker 5 (23:59):
In fact, he said that in the old days.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
Of business, if you walked in and said I've got
twenty years or twenty years of experience, that was a
real benefits. These days, it's not as much because the
systems are so different, the environment is so different, and
you almost have to unlearn old ways of doing things
to appreciate the new ways of doing things.

Speaker 5 (24:20):
Do you do you agree with that?

Speaker 3 (24:21):
Do you feel like, yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Actually,
that was a really interesting conversation between me and our
CTO here because I said, hey, you know, I came
in with thirty years of experience in industry, and it
was like, oh, you know, yeah, me too, I have,
you know, from something similar. But don't think about it
as an advantage necessarily, because some cases you do have

(24:44):
to unlearn some of these things. When you start looking
at some of the technologies available.

Speaker 4 (24:52):
What we call the.

Speaker 3 (24:54):
Digital native folks that are coming up a high school college,
they're already immersing these things and they can pick up
things very quickly, multiple stacks before somebody. It's actually sometimes
harder to teach somebody who's you know, got the ten
years experience to adopt and learn the new technology because
they're so biased and some of the way they've been

(25:16):
thinking of you know, old you know, old system, old methodologies.
They have to unlearn some of that in order to
accelerate the learning on the new technologies.

Speaker 5 (25:28):
Right.

Speaker 2 (25:29):
You know, we had a guy in the show a
while ago, Chris Gladwin. He is the CEO of a
company called Oscience, and they do hyper scale data warehousing
where they can literally ingest trillions of records. We're talking
just gobsmacking amounts of data. And he mused that you
can't be looking at log files like individual log files anymore.

(25:50):
You have to be scanning and using machine learning to
see patterns in the log files. And this is an
example of how much things have changed.

Speaker 5 (25:58):
You can't.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
I mean, it's kind of like, I mean, this is
maybe not the best analogy, but in auto repair, it
used to really have to know what this was and
what that was.

Speaker 5 (26:07):
These days they stick that little.

Speaker 2 (26:08):
Thing in there and they get their reading in the computer.
And it's a whole different ballgame for how you address problems,
how you understand the problem space, what you do to
solve it.

Speaker 5 (26:16):
So all these things, you.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
Know, some of the folks are you kind of have
to unlearn some of what they've learned in order to
really embrace this new age.

Speaker 4 (26:24):
Right absolutely.

Speaker 3 (26:25):
I mean, you know, so we're teaching how to do
modern modern development, right, if you start trying to teach
folks that are coming from the old school, they're doing
manual test, development, doing all the stuff. A lot of
that is automated nowadays, right, And how do you package
and deploy to the cloud? Very different when you're trying

(26:47):
to deploy an on premise situation. For most people actually
kind of live most of their careers in and you
have to actually really teach them that advancement is and
they actually get shocked when you say how easy it
is that these things are auto. Instead of testing for weeks,
these things are checked in multiple multiple times a day,
tested the whole harness multiple times a day, and is

(27:10):
ready to deploy tomorrow.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
Right, yeah, yeah, And that's the kind of speed that
you need these days because if you think about all
the tools that we have at our disposal, well guess what,
the bad guys have all those tools at their disposal
as well. And you know, we've seen some really, really
bad hacks. I always point to the Colonial pipeline hack,
which you know the media said was not state sponsored.

Speaker 5 (27:32):
I don't really believe that.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
I don't expect you to comment on it, but you know,
when when an organization brings down the distribute distribution of
gas for the eastern seaboard. I mean that's a real
serious problem, right. That's not like the you know, the
target breach or something where customer data stone that's bad too,
But goodness gracious, when something is important as fuel is
deprived of huge areas of the country, that's what you

(27:57):
really have to start focusing. And that's I think there's
a wake up call to a lot of people in
the security space to realize that these threats are very real.
They are persistent what do they call them APT advanced
persistent threats, right, yep, yeah, And you know.

Speaker 3 (28:11):
I mean there's a lot of things that are continue
to merging. I guess it's cat and mouse, right. Vendor
partners are constantly trying to be ahead of it, and
all the perpetrators are of course trying to one up
the next the next solution. But a lot I think
the weakest link in all of that is still around
the people.

Speaker 4 (28:29):
Right.

Speaker 3 (28:29):
So when you talk about inside our threat, unless you
have a holistic approach to really patch all the different
layers of security, you're always going to be vulnerable. We
can't just be totally reliant just on the advanced technology.
But you have to get your people trained and that
they're not creating the vulnerabilities themselves. Right.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
Well, and you know, I get really excited about some
of the newer technologies and you think about the capacity
we have now to scan entire net works to map
them out, where are the apps, whereas the data going,
who's accessing the data? And there are just huge areas
that you can close off. I mean, we didn't used
to have the capacity to really understand who's using one

(29:14):
and when at some sort of significant scale, but now
we have that. And there's some basic things like users
who haven't logged in in the past six months, shut
them down. They're probably gone, right and just see right, right.

Speaker 9 (29:27):
Right, right exactly.

Speaker 4 (29:28):
It actually does that.

Speaker 3 (29:29):
Ye.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
Well, And that's the other side of the equation too, right,
is that it Historically you could have a policy. There
was a bunch of words that someone had to manually
update and enforce.

Speaker 5 (29:39):
You don't have to do that anymore.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
You can have policies that are extant and affect information
systems dynamically. Now you still have a manual override switch
at some point say okay, the machine did this, but
I wanted to do that. But still when you automate
that you solve probably eighty percent of your challenges out
of the box, right.

Speaker 3 (29:59):
Yeah, And you're starting to wed to a lot of
the self healing platforms now, right, so you don't have
to really have the intervention, getting the right policies and
business shows out there and pretty much you know, lock
and loaded. Right, it just does that, and you know,
you just have to worry about some of the notifications.
And with a lot of the data that comes in,
you can control how much or how little you know

(30:22):
that you can actually then prioritize where you can actually
have the human the loop to intervene as necessary.

Speaker 2 (30:27):
Yeah, right, Well, and just in terms of data usage
and data storage, for example, to be able to isolate
cold data, understand nobody's using this data? You know, do
we really need it? And I mean this is a
full time job for folks, even with the new technologies,
to be able to scan these environments. Data governance, right,
I mean, I'm guessing you've probably seen this too. Data governance.

(30:50):
We talked about it ten years ago. You couldn't really
do it. Five years ago we talked about it. We're
starting to be able to do it now, you can
really do very fine grained data governance in all kinds
of environments.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
Right, Oh, absolutely, And you know it's taken from the
policy or the written documents and actually scripting and actually
automating that, right, so it's actually executable. In the past,
it's about, hey, here's the policy, somebody has to interpret it.
Then you have to kind of write the sop to
and hope that somebody will actually react and perform it.

Speaker 2 (31:21):
Right, Right, that's the thing you used actually just hope,
you know, and pray that someone was actually reading it
and then adhering to it. These days, it is a
completely different environment. And you know, I'll just throw another
fun concept that you I was at the out Systems
conference in Amsterdam last November and they just came out

(31:41):
their a local platform. They just came out with Mentor
is their new copilot, and you could actually load a
requirements document into this thing and it will generate the
app for you and then you just start fine tuning it.
That's an example of how much things have changed, right
that you can just because the JENAI can read pars
understand the text. And you know what they did that

(32:02):
blew my mind is the agent actually noticed a missing
option and filled it in automatically.

Speaker 5 (32:10):
Now that's when.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
You're really getting somewhere and using the machines to the
greatest of their strengths.

Speaker 5 (32:15):
Right.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
Absolutely, it's a balance, right, So, and we always consider
that in our training, right because before we you know,
in traditional sense of how you know, you do applications development,
you go through the different methodologies and teach them everything.
Right now they have to really learn how to code

(32:36):
tests with AI or agents at their disposal, right, and
you can have multiple agents that they can be working on,
so almost as a programmer, you're not just an individual now, right,
you actually have to learn almost to manage these agents.
And then the sort of like the traffic cop or
referee as a final arbiter says, okay, this is a fine.

(32:59):
This is the final code. It's what it's supposed to be.
But it's not like you're doing it from scratch.

Speaker 2 (33:05):
Right, No, this is what Jensen Hwang was talking about
just the other day, saying that ID departments will be
more like HR departments for AI agents in the future.

Speaker 4 (33:15):
Yeah, that's a good analogy, which.

Speaker 5 (33:16):
Is pretty funny. Right, You're like, wow, that's interesting.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
I do think there's a good ways to go still
in being able to effectively harness such agents, shepherd them,
manage them, catalog what they're doing, be able to really
understand what they're allowed to do.

Speaker 5 (33:34):
Because you've turned something fully autonomous.

Speaker 2 (33:36):
You never know what's going to happen out there, but
it is moving very very quickly. And you were seeing
this agentic focus from big companies like of course Salesforce
is doing that. Lots of small companies too. Well, folks,
don't touch the That'll be right back where you're listening
to Inside Analysis.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
Expected, Welcome back to Inside Analysis. Here's your host, Eric Tabanac.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
All right, folks back here on Inside Analysis, a fascinating
show with Chris Coligato. He is with fed Stack. This
is a new brand spine out of the smooth Stack operation.
They train folks to work for the big service integrators
that work for our US government and get things done.
And I guess one question i'd ask you is what
was the impetus to launch fed stack as a separate

(34:26):
entity or as a separate brand.

Speaker 5 (34:28):
What happened that.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
That led you guys to believe, hey, we need to
do something different here, we need to have a new focus.

Speaker 3 (34:34):
Yeah, so when we look at you know, the origins
of smooth Stack when it started about five sixty five,
six years ago. Uh, the initial focus was on the
enterprise side, right, commercial companies and so on, And when
we started looking at marketing some of these things into

(34:56):
the federal market, it's almost like by accident that we've
found out that there's an actual, real need and gap
for actual partnering with systems integrators. They become basically became
our initial targets because they're the ones that are actually
trying to fulfill a lot of the talent requirements for

(35:16):
the federal government. And it's a very slow process, each
one competing with each other with the same pool of resources.
And it became you know, apparent to us because one
of our founders here actually had a previous company that
was also doing a lot of consulting and they had
to compete for the same pool of resources. And when
they discovered that, hey, if we really want the quality

(35:39):
of people that we want in order to serve as
our main clients, we actually have to come up with
our own way of actually training them up. And so
it was born out of that experience as a separate
company where they developed this that they say, you know,
what we can actually offer this to other partners now,
And that's kind of how we was born, right, It's like,
all right, we kind of figure out what the seksaurcewise,

(36:00):
we do it for ourselves, we prove that we can
do it better than anybody else, and basically started really
adding logos of new companies and then it started from there.
But it became very apparent that what we're doing it's
a very different way of doing business, at least from
a growth perspective on how you go after work in
the enterprise or commercial sector versus a very highly regulated environment.

Speaker 4 (36:25):
For instance.

Speaker 3 (36:26):
You know, in order to deploy somebody to a commercial environment,
it's pretty easy. They don't have a lot of background investigation,
security clearances, and things like that. We have to ensure
that when somebody graduates from a class, they're actually ready
and able to actually work, right. So that's part of

(36:47):
an additional offering that we have with our partners and
directly to the government is while people are training on
our dime, they're already going through the secret or top
secret interim clearance processes, so that when we say they're
ready to report after twelve weeks, they really can actually
execute rather than waiting for months and months even you know,
to be vetted in, right. So we felt that, you know,

(37:11):
knowledge of how you do business in the federal government
is different than the way we actually do transactions and
the commercial sector. And it also became apparent that, hey,
we also want to be in the prime game at
some point, right. So at this point, we're serving a
lot of the partners that we have on board our
Tier two and three training, Tier three services, and we

(37:35):
wanted to actually be in control of our own destiny,
and we wanted to basically deliver solutions themselves, right, and
also continue the career path for the folks that we've
actually have been training up so far. A number of
that is being converted to our partners as their employees
in the future as we start to expand our offerings

(37:55):
and actually doing a consulting, we're actually creating a career
path for them to continue should they decide not to
move forward with existing projects they're deployed to. We're creating
an opportunity for them to actually continue their employment with
fedstack and serving and full consulting well after they've gotten
some of the experience of the entry level professional services.

(38:17):
They can actually get a career path all the way
through solutions, architects, senior architects, and so on as they
pursue an next step with the career.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
Yeah, well that's great, and I mean I know from experience,
and I'm sure you've seen this as well, that when
someone really knows what to do in a situation involving
industrial enterprise technology, they can save you time money. I
mean we're talking weeks, months, millions of dollars, even billions
of dollars if they really know what they're doing. And

(38:50):
it's difficult for people to ascertain that. I mean, if
you don't know, it's like we always joke about in
the old days the car repairman was like a doctor
who told you was wrong, how much it would take
to fix in everything. It's like, well, if you're on
the outside, how can you challenge it. I mean, the
business leaders and the government leaders need to know some
of this stuff to be able to challenge things and understand.

Speaker 5 (39:11):
That's why it's so.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
Important to get a good trusted advisor to help you
on these projects, right, because they can make all the
difference in the world.

Speaker 3 (39:18):
What do you think, Yeah, absolutely so, I think that's
a very good point, because another piece that kind of
differentiates us is we're not just doing technical training, right,
So part of actually our curriculum is to do well
rounded consultants at the end of the process, right, So
we teach them how to communicate in a target environment

(39:41):
for let's say, for a particular project within an agency.
We also teach them how to operate with that agency,
give them lessons on the mission itself. And that's a
big different difference between the commercial and the federal side
is it has to be mission aligned, right, So it's
not just about the technology that you're doing. You need
to understand with the mission you're supporting. And that combination

(40:03):
of mission knowledge coming from the experts and the clients
themselves immersed with the technology know how, that's a really
great combination that we're trying to push forward.

Speaker 5 (40:14):
Yeah, and it's the next generation.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
I mean, we talk about the ten X developer for example,
which refers to someone who really either knows the full
stack or knows enough that they don't waste time and
they can really produce quickly. And these days that's going
to rely heavily on using copilots, on being open minded
about what these systems can tell us understanding that a
copilot will get you almost all the way there. I

(40:38):
think eighty percent is a good rule of thumb, the
Preado principles everywhere in life, right, they can get you
eighty percent of the way there, and then you have
to do the fine tuning to kind of finish that
all out. But to not embrace those technologies is really
a non start of these days.

Speaker 3 (40:52):
What do you think, Oh, yeah, you're going to be
left behind, right, because everybody's doing that in all aspects.
An in the federal business for example, not just from
the technology folks that we're training, but even our business
development right as we're responding to RFIs and rps. You
better believe it that you need you know, AI and
just being able to sift through the mountains of data

(41:14):
just to qualify you know what you're going to be
right and then get a starter, setup a draft at
least to meet some of the compliance requirements. And you know,
when you look at using a co pilot, let's say
pointed to a public training database or LLM, you need
to make sure that you're augmenting it with your private

(41:35):
training data set that's unique to your organization. Otherwise everybody
is pulling from the same data, the same hallucinations, and
you look at some of the folks that are actually
on the client side and receiving end, it's like, well,
you know what, you're just using copilot on this one.
Everybody else does you submit exactly the same content as
can get really funny. So I think that's how we

(41:58):
organizations will kind of this forward. I'd say you're right
about eighty percent of it is just to be an
equal footing with your competitors that everybody else is using it.
Where you have to make the differentiator is what is
your private training data that allows you then to actually
put forward what's really unique about your organization.

Speaker 5 (42:19):
Yeah, no doubt about it.

Speaker 2 (42:20):
I mean, and there are so many different realms to address.
I guess legacy systems. That's got to be a concern
for government agencies and for the sis that you work
with is how do we migrate away from some of
these systems. You know, some of these environments are using
old operating systems that are not even maintained anymore. That

(42:42):
in and of itself is a huge space to address.

Speaker 5 (42:45):
Right.

Speaker 3 (42:46):
Yes, a lot of these modernizations have been going on
for decades, right, They've been involved in some of the
agencies that they started it thirty years ago, right and
still still ongoing. And some of these systems already you know,
back to the fifties and sixties when they were initially built.
I think the next challenge though, I think everybody is
trying to modernize, moving from the old coboal you know,

(43:09):
assembly languages into the even away from the main frames
into into some of the newer technologies.

Speaker 8 (43:14):
Right.

Speaker 4 (43:15):
But I think the next challenge.

Speaker 3 (43:16):
Would be how about the workforce program managers technical managers
of the old system. Once it's migrated, right, you then
need to equip them on how to manage in the
new technology.

Speaker 5 (43:29):
Right.

Speaker 3 (43:29):
So it's actually an interesting thing.

Speaker 10 (43:32):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (43:33):
That's why we actually uh created our Tier three services,
our partner training both straight to the government is being
able to say, how do we help you in your transition.
You're all in, everybody's involved, our partners sis the government.
They just move from the legacy system and they just
upgrade it to the new sets of technologies. Well, they

(43:53):
know the domain knowledge, right and the business policies and
the old one, they don't know how to translate and
operate in the new environment. So in fact, helping folks
that preserve that old knowledge because that's important or to
operate in a new environment. But they need to learn
how to operate in the new environment. So that's really
how our two er three offering really originated, is for

(44:17):
that demand that a lot of folks are in modernization.
Then they're figuring out, oh my god, I have a
lot of talent here I need to preserve, but they're
not used to the new technology. So there needs to
be a transition, right, preserving that old knowledge and being
able to operate in the future.

Speaker 2 (44:33):
Absolutely, well, folks, podcast bonus segment coming up next. We'll
be right back, I mean, all right, folks, time for
the podcast bonus segment here on Inside Analysis with Chris
Coldegato of fed Stack and Chris, lots of people out
there are looking for jobs. You know, we're in a
very strange time right now. You're going to see lots
of layoffs at big companies as companies really try to

(44:56):
reorganize and understand how to work in this new world
because with all these copilots, well, let's face it, people
who have jobs are going to have to do slightly
different jobs or even significantly different jobs and really stay
abreast of what's happening out there. So what's your advice
to folks to help them understand maybe which direction they
should go if they want to work with you, which

(45:17):
path should they follow? How do you know what you're
going to enjoy doing? What's your advice to people looking
for work right now?

Speaker 3 (45:24):
So you know, I think it's important to know kind
of what level you're at at this point. Right, we
specialize on a lot of the folks that are actually
in the entry level folks, right, so we're creating that
launching that career path for folks that are exiting in
college or just trying to break in the same thing

(45:44):
with the former military. If you're in a situation where
you are experience and you're experiencing a layoff, right, it
could be a little bit of a shock when you
try to enter the market and you're used to working
in the legacy environment and now you're asked to operate
in an environment you've never been exposed to. And so
I think that's critically important that you gain the proper

(46:07):
skills that's marketable in the current environment.

Speaker 4 (46:12):
We talked a lot about AI and.

Speaker 3 (46:15):
Basically augmenting what you may you may be an experienced
developer in the past, but a lot of expectation is
that you have to learn how to program together with
your assistance or your AI assistance, and that's a brand
new gain. So in order for you to not only
differentiate yourself, but just to keep up right because your

(46:39):
competition is actually probably not necessarily the uh, the tenured resources,
but even the upcoming uh you know, younger generation who's
actually been brought up in this type of technology. Right,
So it's it's very very important to understand the landscape,
who your competitors are, and then be able to highlight

(47:02):
what your value proposition is.

Speaker 5 (47:04):
Right, yeah, you know.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
And one final question I'll throw at you, which part
of the market do you think is most underserved? Is
there an area like AI, cybersecurity, analytics, data infrastructure? Are
there any areas that seem to be bigger than others
in terms of opportunities that you're seeing Right now?

Speaker 4 (47:23):
AI is exploding, so that's very important.

Speaker 3 (47:28):
Data centers are popping up, which basically, you know, coming
with AI, it's kind of chicken our eggscenario there one
is kind of feeding each other, right, we'd add the
a b AI more computing power, more data center is going
to be up, so technicians on the data center area
is actually a very strong growth area to focus on,

(47:48):
which also can gain you exposed to some of the
AI applications development. Maybe a good entry way is to
start of getting exposed to the infrastructure that's going to
be housing a lot of this AI and computing power.
So I think those two And of course CyberSecure is
always a requirement, So regardless of what you're heading, you

(48:09):
need to make sure that you're well rounded. Any kind
of solutions you're developing is well grounded in security.

Speaker 5 (48:16):
Yeah, that's really good advice.

Speaker 2 (48:18):
And I always suggest to folks, and I'm guessing your degree,
focus on something you really enjoy. If you are naturally
curious about hardware, go down the hardware road. If you're
naturally curious about app development, focus on app development. Mean
that example I gave about these new machines, these new
systems being able to load a requirements document into a
gen AI oriented engine and have it build an app

(48:41):
for you. I mean, that's just crazy. That is so
much different than the way it used to be. And
whenever you see these huge advances in productivity, you got
to jump on board quick, right, Final thoughts from you.

Speaker 4 (48:53):
Chris, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (48:54):
I mean, this is a very fast changing environment and
so going to be left behind very quickly unless you
keep up. So you may be busy doing kind of
what your your day job is, but you need to
kind of do your homework and really continue to learn.
Continuous learning is what you're going to give you, you know,
keep your value long term.

Speaker 5 (49:17):
That's great, that's great advice.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
Well, look these folks up online, Chris Coligato co O
L I G A d O.

Speaker 5 (49:23):
It's fed Stack.

Speaker 2 (49:25):
Congratulations on doing some good work keeping our country safe, prosperous.
That's what we want to see here, folks. Seventy meilf
I want to be on the show. Info at inside
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to the Superwroth dot Com.

Speaker 16 (55:07):
Tune into The farrand Dozier Show. Music Marks Place in Time,
the soundtrack to life. Sunday nights at eight pm are
KCAA Radio playing the hottest hits and the coolest conversations
Sunday nights at APM on The Ferrand Dozier Show within
the array of music, talk, sports, community outreach and veteran resources.

Speaker 9 (55:29):
The hits from the sixties.

Speaker 16 (55:31):
Seventies, eighties, nineties, and today's hits. The ferand Dozier Show
on KCAA Radio on all available streaming platforms and on
a six point five m and ten fifty AM The
ferrando Zier Show on KCAA Radio.

Speaker 6 (56:00):
KCAA Radio has openings for one hour talk shows. If
you want to host a radio show, now is the time.
Make kca your flangship station. Our rates are affordable and
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population of five million people plus. We stream and podcast
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been thinking about broadcasting a weekly radio program on real

(56:23):
radio plus the Internet, contact our CEO at two eight
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(56:47):
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Speaker 8 (56:58):
Listening to KCAA Melinda at one oh six point five
FM K two ninety three cf Brito Bealley.

Speaker 6 (57:05):
One of the best ways to build a healthier local
economy is by shopping locally. Teamster Advantage is a shop
local program started by Teamster Local nineteen thirty two that
is brought together hundreds of locally owned businesses to provide
discounts for residents who make shopping locally their priority. Everything
from restaurants like Corkis to fund times at SB Raceway

(57:29):
and much much more. If you're not currently a teamster
and you want access to these local business discounts, contact
Jennifer at nine oh nine eight eight nine eight three
seven seven Extension two twenty four.

Speaker 5 (57:45):
Give her a call.

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That number again is nine oh nine eight eight nine
eight three.

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Seven seven Extension two twenty four.

Speaker 10 (57:57):
NBC News Radio. I'm Lisa Carton. Both Canada and Mexico
are responding to new US tariffs with retaliatory measures of
their own. The news follows President Trump's decision to implement
twenty five percent tariffs against Mexico and Canada. He also
imposed an extra ten percent levy on Chinese goods. Canadian
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country will implement twenty

(58:20):
five percent tariffs against US goods starting tuesday. Mexican President
Claudia Sinbaum also said sheep plans to follow suit, but
no specifics were given. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is
set to meet with President Trump on Tuesday. The meeting
would make him the first foreign leader to visit the
White House during Trump's second term. In a letter to

(58:41):
nettan Yahoo, President Trump said he looks forward to discussing
how they can bring peace to Israel and their efforts
to counter our shared adversaries. Netanyahu's visit comes as negotiations
are expected to resume between Israel and the Palestinian militant
group AMAS to extend the ongoing ceasefire. The acting fb
BI director is reportedly pushing back on the Trump administration's

(59:03):
order to fire senior FBI officials. On Friday, several of
the FBI's lead executives who helped investigate President Trump's alleged
crimes were removed from their roles. Brian Driscoll sent out
a memo saying he'd been ordered to remove eight senior
FBI executives in turn over the names of every FBI
employee involved in capital riot cases. Driscoll reportedly refused the

(59:26):
Justice Department's order so aggressively that other FBI officials feared
he would be forced out. Are you winging it for
the Super Bowl? Broccoli might be a cheaper party snack
this year. A Super Bowl watch party will cost about
the same as last year. A Wells Fargo report shows
feeding ten people for the Big Game will run around
one hundred and thirty nine Bucks, which is just ten

(59:48):
cents more last year. You're listening to the latest on
NBC News Radio.

Speaker 8 (59:55):
NBC News on CACAA level. The day sponsored by teamsterun's
Local nineteen teen thirty two. Protecting the Future of Working
Families Cheamsters nineteen thirty two, dot org