Security Remains Key To Government Sales

According to the latest CRN Monthly Solution Provider Survey, 57 percent of solution providers playing in the government space said they expect to see sales growth of at least 6 percent in the coming three months. This figure has remained steady for the better part of 12 months, dipping below 50 percent only twice last year—in August and October.

What technologies is the government buying? Purchases run the gamut from plain old hardware upgrades to emerging technologies such as wireless, IP telephony and blade systems. But no matter the technology or the level of government agency—be it federal, state or local—solution providers say the ultimate sales driver is security.

"We are seeing traction as a result of FISMA [the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002], which mandates the level of security within [federal] government organizations," said Jeff Oliveto, senior manager of engineering at iGov, a solution provider in McLean, Va. "It's truly a paradigm shift—now the Office of Management and Budget has the ability to hold up projects if the security baseline set forth by NIST [the National Institute of Standards and Technologies] has not been met."

As a result, FISMA is doing for the government space what legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and HIPAA did for securing corporate environments, Oliveto said.

"The Department of Defense employs 5 million people, so for anything to do with access control, for example, it mandates that multifactor identification be used in moderate to high-risk applications," said iGov Vice President Brad Mack. "They want to make sure people are who they say they are. Plus, they need authentication and endpoint security" to ensure that information on government laptops or PDAs that might fall into the wrong hands is not retrievable, he said.

"Endpoint security is the most overlooked part of security," Mack added. "The challenges we see are the same ones corporate America has."

But to create an end-to-end secure solution—especially one that meets the federal government's increasingly strict requirements—requires working with a plethora of security vendors. That means any solution provider hoping to play in this sector needs to be completely up to date on the latest technology and interoperability requirements.

"There are 38 different product categories of point-type solutions, and within those categories are subcategories and products that fit into multiple categories. It's easy to buy things that don't interoperate," Mack said. "So from a business standpoint, we win business by demonstrating our base of knowledge and experience the customer can trust."

Roger Chilcott, senior engineer at Sentel, a systems integrator in Alexandria, Va., said high-security departments are looking for alternative ways to build their networks to minimize risk—a need blade servers address quite effectively.

"Since we work in a secure environment, mission-critical security is the primary need," Chilcott said. "A conventional PC layout would mean that I would have to space my PCs one meter away from each other to meet the security demands. But by implementing blades, I can stack C/Ports [ClearCube's user ports] on top of each other to meet those demands and have a smaller footprint. Plus I can put a user in a smaller area, and I don't have to have extra power."

Sentel uses ClearCube's blade system and is pushing the technology into Air Force base locations. "The Air Force seems to be climbing on the bandwagon," he said. "Cheyenne Mountain [Air Force Station] has about 500 blades and couldn't be happier, as well as Lackland Air Force Base and Nellis Air Force Base."

Part of the beauty of blades is the ability to restrict what goes on them—or what comes off, Chilcott said. "When you get into a particular environment, especially the high-security environments, you have to restrict what the user can do. Blades are beneficial in that respect," he said.

Security also is making its mark at the state and local levels, said Dave Woodward, vice president of network solutions at Calence, Tempe, Ariz. "It's always cyclical that every five to seven years [state and local] government agencies are in a position where they have funding and can upgrade, and they're looking to build end-to-end security," he said.

Security consulting accounts for a large part of Calence's government business, along with IP telephony, another bright spot, Woodward said.

"Many [agencies] are upgrading their networks to prepare for IP telephony, to build voice capabilities into the architecture," Woodward said. "At the local level is where I see more planning ahead for the advanced technologies they want to deploy, even if it's not right away."

WLAN extensions in campus and downtown environments also are becoming more prevalent as cities look to revitalize their city centers. "The city of Tempe issued an RFP for just such a project, and there has been a lot of discussion about the city of Phoenix [putting in a wireless network]," Woodward said. "Cities all over are looking for ways to attract people back into the downtown area, and wireless is one way to do that."

The need for government agencies to stay interconnected is what's driving Berbee Information Networks' IP telephony business, said Ken Bywaters, director of IP telephony at the Madison, Wis.-based solution provider and Cisco Gold partner.

Berbee has found interest in its own IP speaker, called Informacast, which can be added to Cisco's AVVID telephony solution to expand its speakerphone capabilities and to replace traditional paging systems without having to rewire old buildings, Bywaters said. "It means that now the Smithsonian [Institute], the FBI and the SEC, for example, all can talk to each other with the same system," he said.

However, selling the government on IP telephony—or any emerging technology for that matter—can sometimes be difficult, Bywaters said. "Most agencies look at emerging technologies as the something they might not otherwise have because they've already made the investment in the infrastructure," he said. "But many times, the [outdated] PBX can force that decision [to move to IP telephony]."

Nonetheless, with the right message and the right experience, solution providers have an incredible opportunity this year to make their mark in the government vertical. "The federal government's network is larger than the Fortune 1 through 10 companies combined," iGov's Mack said. "The amount of money it spends on IT is larger than the Fortune 1 through 10 combined. It's huge."