WT 360: The market from all angles

Systems Planning & Analysis touts itself as a technical services provider charged with “helping clients move from strategy to action faster,” a tagline that also helps explain how mission timelines are shrinking fast.

Rich Sawchak, chief executive of Systems Planning & Analysis, joins for this episode to describe how companies like SPA have incorporated those faster timelines into how they support efforts in areas like simulation and countering unmanned aerial systems.

Artificial intelligence is of course entering the equation in those areas and more. In talking with our Ross Wilkers, Sawchak overviews where AI is being implemented full...

Anduril and the Navy are co-investing in a submarine component production plant that the service branch is hoping can be a boost to the country’s shipbuilding capacity.

Lauren Williams, business editor at Defense One, has extensively covered the Navy’s challenges regarding its efforts to increase shipbuilding throughput and joins for this episode to explain how this new shipyard is a part of that push.

What keeps Navy leaders up at night on the shipbuilding front? In talking with our Ross Wilkers, Lauren goes over the constraints that have built up over time and reco...

Point solutions have long dominated the government technology conversations, in part because agencies have focused on solving specific organizational problems instead of looking at them in a multi-functional way.

Mark Lee, chief executive of Entarian, joins for this episode to break down today’s federal market landscape as one where mission integration is where the conversation begins and ends with agencies. Technology still does enter the chat without being the be-all and end-all, as Lee tells our Ross Wilkers.

Lee also overviews the role of Entarian’s solution development team as the company’s engine for ma...

Federal technology integrators spent much of fiscal year 2025 trying to see what a new world order of contracting would look like, then FY 2026 was all about settling into that environment.

John Caucis and James Wichert, public sector analysts at the market intelligence firm Technology Business Research, join for this episode to go over how agencies’ emphasis on outcomes and accountability from contractors are carrying over into the just-started fiscal 2027.

One way integrators are responding to that scrutiny is offering more intellectual property, including reusable software and other products. Caucis and Wichert walk our Ross Wilkers th...

All three frontier artificial intelligence companies now have either have new agreements in place or extensions to their current pacts as part of OneGov: the government’s initiative for consolidating its brand name tech purchases.

Christian Robles, who reports on technology policy and service delivery at Nextgov/FCW, joins for this episode to provide the details of who signed with the General Services Administration and for what. Not every agreement is exactly alike regarding the length of time and terms for usage and cost, as Christian told our Ross Wilkers.

Christian also goes over a GSA...

JPMorgan Chase stood up its $1.5 trillion Security and Resiliency Initiative in the fall of 2025 with flexibility built into the system because one approach may work for a certain situation, but not for another.

Sara O’Rourke, managing director for SRI solutions at JPMorgan Chase, joins for this episode to go over how the team pursues investment and financing opportunities in industries directly connected to national and economic security and resiliency.

As O’Rourke tells our Ross Wilkers, identifying what the vulnerabilities are is step one before the team can design solutions for addressing choke points in s...

At the time of this episode’s recording, the Small Business Administration had received 66,000 comments in response to its proposed sweeping rewrite of size standards for determining who is in fact a small business.

Stephanie Kostro, president of the Professional Services Council, joins for this episode to explain SBA’s ideas that would base the standards on market size instead of receipts and headcount.

Kostro led off the conversation with Nick and Ross by using the word “seismic,” and for good reason, as this proposal would be a fundamental reordering of the market if SBA goes ahe...

Digital Infuzion was born in 1999 as a health informatics company with the idea of helping organizations improve clinical research and its first client at the the National Institutes of Health remains a customer.

Hemant Virkar, founder and chief executive of Digital Infuzion, joins for this episode to explain how the company has grown beyond those initial healthcare roots to add new practice areas across the broad umbrella of digital transformation.

The company still leans on that heritage to act as a shepherd for agencies as they travel the path of modernization, as Virkar tells our...

One fundamental change to how the government contracting ecosystem functions centers on technology development and fielding: all of that must happen quicker and on a different cadence than before.

Steve Lefkowitz and Raj Kanodia, co-founders and leaders of Sagewind Capital, join for this episode to shed light on how the private equity firm’s portfolio companies have responded to that government-wide push for quicker and different forms of tech development and fielding.

The handful of contractors owned by Sagewind have made technology core to their strategies and prioritize making decisions on what is often called an...

Greg Barbaccia’s impending departure from the federal chief information officer role after 18 months in it is one of a handful of headline topics that got industry’s attention over the past six weeks.

As NextGov/FCW’s executive editor, Jessie Bur captains a team of reporters who cover developments across the government landscape with an eye toward those that overlap with our areas of interest here at WT.

Jessie joins Nick and Ross for this episode to take a tour around the world of Fed Tech news and happenings, starting with Barbaccia’s pending exit fro...

LMI touts itself as a provider of “commercial-grade, mission-ready technology” as a description of its goal to bring fast-moving technology into federal environments with strict requirements on security and other key matters.

But how does LMI define that technology and how do they bring it forward to agencies?

Alex Adamczyk – vice president of sales, engineering and rapid prototyping at Company No. 73 on our 2026 Top 100 – joins for this episode to answer those questions and more about LMI’s approach to innovation and integration.

Culture is everything, to the point that LMI reorganized the company to emphasi...

If 2025 and 2026 have told us anything, it is that the government no longer sees the decades-long status quo of acquisition as acceptable anymore because the world is too different now.

Matt Kasberg, chief executive of Company No. 73 on our 2026 Top 100, joins for this episode to explain how Odyssey Systems works with the defense acquisition community and provides an industry point-of-view on all the changes to that function of government.

In Kasberg’s words, “acquisition is a warfighting function” and that requires a keen understanding of demand signals from operators. The Pentagon’s emphasis on speed and a di...

By joining Constellis as CEO in February, Dan Gelston took the helm at a company with a vision of moving beyond a reactive security model to a more proactive and tech-enabled one.

Gelston joins our Ross Wilkers for this episode to provide an update on the rollout of that strategy, which centers around integrating predictive analytics and other artificial intelligence-driven technologies into Constellis’ core business lines of training and risk management.

“Guards, gates, guns and dogs” have long defined security operations over many decades. But as Gelston explains, that is no longer enough in a more c...

The 2026 Washington Technology Top 100 rankings are now live for everyone to use in their own research of the federal market’s largest technology and services contractors, plus the industry’s major overarching themes.

For this episode, Nick and Ross huddle up to overview edition number 32 of WT’s flagship project that certainly does have an element of “Who’s Up and Who’s Down” to it.

One question we posed in our breakdown of 2025’s rankings was whether 2026 would look noticeably different in light of the Trump administration’s cuts to contract spending and the federal workforce...

The second Trump administration has outpaced the first one in terms of executive orders signed by the president, but this current tenure has put more focus on government contracting than before.

Stephanie Kostro, president of the Professional Services Council, starts out this episode with Nick and Ross by providing historical context to that statement. Then the discussion turns to President Trump’s newest executive orders that focus on fixed-price contracts and artificial intelligence.

Neither of those topics are new to the GovCon ecosystem, but executive orders bring them to the forefront like few other actions ca...

We have taken a deeper dive into the government market’s private investment landscape in recent weeks by hearing the viewpoints of a banker and then a venture capital specialist.

Kirk Konert, managing partner at AE Industrial Partners, joins for this episode to continue the conversation by weighing in on private capital trends across the market and explaining what goes into aligning business decisions with the government priorities.

AE Industrial is also at the heart of the investment action, which in recent months has included initial public offerings of two portfolio companies. Konert takes our Ro...

If it feels like investors everywhere have some curiosity about the defense tech landscape, then it’s because more of them both want to increase their knowledge and sometimes involvement in the ecosystem.

Steve Brotman, founder and managing partner of the growth equity investment firm Alpha Partners, fits into that category as an observer and participant that works with venture capital firms to be involved in promising tech companies.

Steve joins our Ross Wilkers for this episode to answer the questions laid out in the title, namely how it became cool again for investors to ge...

The window for government contractors, especially those in defense and space technology, to go public is open again as several listings over the past 12 months show and SpaceX’s own offering this year will illustrate.

Dave Khalsa, head of mid-cap defense and government technology investment banking at J.P. Morgan, works on transactions of many different types and observes all of them to help companies in the market figure it all out.

In starting out this episode, Dave explains what all companies can take away from the handful of initial public offerings over the past 12 mo...

The federal government’s lead agency for domestic cybersecurity and infrastructure protection matters has only completed its first week of being fully back up and running after not being funded for 11 weeks.

David DiMolfetta, cyber reporter at NextGov/FCW, has covered how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has operated through a period that followed losses of nearly one-third of its workforce under this Trump administration.

David joins our Ross Wilkers for this episode to lay out CISA’s path forward with funding in place, plus what the agency’s stakeholders in the private and public...

Once again, the U.S. government is accusing China of being among several foreign entities that are looking to steal proprietary information on artificial intelligence models from American companies.

Edward Graham, managing editor and Veterans Affairs Department reporter at NextGov/FCW, discovered a memo the White House sent to federal agencies that warns of distillation campaigns seeking to help create knockoff versions of AI models.

Ed joins our Ross Wilkers for this episode to explain how those campaigns work and, more importantly, how they help illuminate the competition between the U.S. and China to...

Decision authority shifts, the government acting like a venture customer and data transparency being the standard mode of operations are examples of how the old formulas of GovCon business success are becoming outdated.

Davi Hayes, senior director for federal strategy at The Chertoff Group, fields any questions from industry clients seeking to understand those trends and more about how the buying behaviors of their federal customers are changing.

For this episode, Davi joins our Ross Wilkers to lay out some of the answers he found in putting together the article “The Federal Market Has Changed. Ha...

Noblis was stood up in 1996 as a science, technology and strategy organization that works with federal agencies on creating and rolling out solutions for some of their most complex problems.

Mile Corrigan, chief executive of Noblis, joins for this episode to go over the firm’s blueprint for its future beyond this milestone year of celebrating its 30th anniversary and how technology transition efforts are at the heart of that vision.

The government wants tech to get from lab to field much quicker than before. In talking with our Ross Wilkers, Corrigan explains some of th...

While the 20th century’s Space Race was strictly head-to-head, the 21st century variant is much more complex and multipolar as private businesses and nations are looking to lead in this domain.

Kevin Kelly, chief executive of Arcfield, joins for this episode to go over how this systems engineering outfit is looking at the landscape through the lens of a company that has both government and private sector customers.

In talking with Ross Wilkers, Kelly explains the art and science of managing space as it gets more and more crowded thanks to plummeting launch costs.

Cuts to contract and grant spending, including outright cancellations, were a feature of the Department of Government Efficiency’s activities during the first year of the Trump administration and some lawsuits followed from those impacted.

Natalie Alms, senior correspondent at NextGov/FCW, worked with our colleague and fellow senior reporter Eric Katz at Government Executive to watch 23 hours of testimony in one of those cases that sheds light on DOGE’s goals and the pressures to meet them.

“Nat” joins our Ross Wilkers for this episode to explain what she and Eric discovered in reporting out a st...

GovCon finds itself in a strange situation where the Homeland Security Department does not have a budget and is in a shutdown, but the three immigration agencies are still operating with some funds.

How is that possible? Stephanie Kostro, president of the Professional Services Council, joins Nick and Ross for this episode to lay out how that is and the DHS funding lapse’s myriad impacts on industry and society.

Their conversation then turns to what contractors are seeking to learn and understand from the U.S. government’s very public breakup with Anthropic, which will...

Science Applications International Corp. can move ahead on their big decision points now that it has a permanent chief executive, which presents at least one element of certainty in a world replete with unknowns.

Nick and Ross use this episode as a starting point for looking at SAIC’s next steps under CEO Jim Reagan, and the paths forward for several other key business and policy storylines in the public sector landscape.

Anthropic’s fight against the U.S. government’s push to eject it from the market has industry-wide implications to unpack, as does the fu...

The Defense Department and Anthropic are on opposite ends of a nasty disagreement, with government-wide and industry-wide implications, over what the company’s Claude large language model and other offerings can be used for.

Alexandra Kelley, our Nextgov/FCW colleague who covers emerging tech, has extensively covered the fallout from that impasse as agencies are working to comply with President Trump’s executive order to stop using Claude after the Pentagon essentially broke up with Anthropic.

“Alexa,” as we and other GovExec colleagues call her, joins our Ross Wilkers for this episode to explain how those pha...

Data labeling refers to the practice of tagging and identifying raw data in order to add meaningful context, of which U.S. government agencies openly admit they struggle with and ask industry for help in.

Peter Kant, founder and chief executive of Enabled Intelligence, started the company in March 2020 to specialize in data labeling work that also relies on continuous training and retraining of artificial intelligence models.

Kant joins for this episode to explain how Enabled Intelligence tailors large language models for use in national security environments where the out-of-the-box tools are not quite ready...

Humans in the loop are, in theory, supposed to be as much a part of all conversations surrounding the use of generative artificial intelligence tools as a way to safeguard against major mistakes.

But as GovCon attorney David Timm has found out, errors showing misuse of the technology are starting to come up in bid protests and other legal rulings that show what can go wrong when relying on the tech too much.

David, a partner at the law firm Burr & Forman, joins our Ross Wilkers for this episode to share his findings from those...

Consolidation and “common goods and services” dominate the discussion around how the federal government wants to revamp its contracting functions, including moves to put the General Services Administration at the center of it all.

Leo Alvarez and Dylan Schreiner, respectively principal and GovCon senior manager at Baker Tilly, are fielding many questions from industry clients on what this landscape looks like and how to map their business strategies to it.

In this episode, Leo and Dylan walk our Ross Wilkers through some of the big-ticket vehicles to watch in 2026 and how they help illustrate the gove...

Pressure points on defense companies from their Pentagon customer to invest more and do business differently than before are coming from multiple levels of leadership, including President Trump himself.

Lauren Williams, business editor at our partner publication Defense One, canvasses the perspectives and opinions of industry pros on that matter to help put together the Defense Business Brief newsletter that goes out every Monday.

Lauren joins our Ross Wilkers for this episode to break down those different pressure points, including Trump’s executive order barring companies from stock repurchases and issuing dividends until they invest mo...

Commercial technology is front-and-center of everyone’s mind across the public sector ecosystem these days, but history shows that agencies have moved slow on the acquisition and adoption fronts here.

Sheila Duffy, founder and chief executive of Greystones Group, views these efforts as grounded in collaboration as customer and contractor both have to agree on the roadmap for development and implementation.

Duffy joins our Ross Wilkers for this episode to go over keys for good collaborations with agencies on rolling out modern tools and how Small Business Innovation Research programs can be a pathway to ac...

Post-shutdown recovery is one item carrying over from calendar year 2025 into 2026 and the chance of another funding stoppage happening on Jan. 30 is not zero percent.

That here-and-now is the starting point of this episode where Stephanie Smith, GovCon industry senior analyst and valuation services director at RSM, takes us through some of the major themes and talking points that will shape the ecosystem in 2026.

How do we define the “non-traditional contractor” and what do their prospects look like? As Steph tells our Ross Wilkers, technical definitions and terms for talking about these companies are moving targ...

The spring of 2024 was a turning point for Nightwing, when the business separated out of its then-parent RTX to become a standalone company focused on cybersecurity and intelligence solutions.

Chris Jones joined Nightwing later that fall as chief technology officer following service as the CIA’s associate deputy director for science and technology. Jones joins for this episode to put into perspective how Nightwing has sought to carve out its own path in the market and priority areas for the company going forward.

In talking with our Ross Wilkers, Jones also explains the role of co...

Most years of a presidential transition result in some adjustments by the government contracting community as a new administration settles in, but 2025 presented more variables to GovCon than ever before.

Stephanie Kostro, president of the Professional Services Council, fields many questions from PSC’s member companies about what is happening across the ecosystem. Kostro joins Nick and Ross for this episode to unpack some that were answered in 2025 and others that remain unanswered for 2026, including the prospects of a second shutdown following the last one.

How the Department of Government Efficiency’s influence remains over GovC...

American Systems opened for business in 1975 and transitioned to an employee stock ownership plan 15 years later, a model that makes it one of the market’s largest 100% ESOP companies.

CEO John Steckel joins for this episode to help mark American Systems’ 50th anniversary and explains some moves it has made this year to set the company up for the next 50, including its largest-ever acquisition.

In talking with our Ross Wilkers, Steckel lays out what the purchase of Epsilon brings to American Systems and larger trends in managed services that led to the transaction. Secured data cent...

In his Nov. 7 address to industry, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth laid out what the U.S. military wants from its contractors and wholesale changes the Pentagon is carrying out to make agile acquisitions a reality.

Lauren Williams, senior editor at Defense One who covers the industrial base, was there in-person and joins our Ross Wilkers for this episode to walk through those structural changes that prior Defense Department leaders have spoken about for years.

One major theme of that dialogue has been DOD’s desire to have more commercial technologies, which has been easier said th...

The 2025 government shutdown is on-record as the largest ever at 43 days, which means the recovery period will last well into the spring and presents a risky environment for contractors to operate in.

Christine Williamson, a partner in the GovCon industry advisory practice at CohnReznick, joins for this episode to walk through five risks she and her colleague Kristen Soles identified as ones companies must watch out for and ways for responding to them.

As Williamson tells our Ross Wilkers, there is much excitement across the entire ecosystem to get back to work and understanding there...

Commence is a newish company looking to help federal agencies, state and local governments, and private sector entities harness technology with the goal of helping care providers make better decisions.

Ian Checcio, chief growth officer at Commence, joins for this episode to go over how the company has come together over 12 months with Pleasant Land’s backing and that vision of further enabling doctors and nurses.

No image describes the current difficulties health care providers face in their data collection and management practices than the fax machine and clipboard, on which every new patient fills ou...

Amentum is marking one year since its merger with Jacobs' government businesses to create a $14 billion-annual revenue company whose strategy centers around engineering and technology.

CEO John Heller joins our Nick Wakeman for this episode to discuss how Amentum has positioned for opportunities in high-growth markets including space systems, nuclear energy and multi-domain defense.

As Heller explains, nuclear engineering expertise is becoming more sought-after as artificial intelligence drives demand for power generation at scale.

The company is also focused on space-based infrastructure for working and living beyond Earth, along with potential opportunities in the...