For VARs, Stimulus Package Ushers In New Opportunities

As in anything, some solution providers cautioned, nothing in the stimulus or health care IT is a fail-safe. You're still making a sale, argued DLT's Marcotte, not being handed a magic bullet, thanks to the government's priorities.

"I don't buy the 'ready, fire, aim' approach to pursuing business in the public sector," Marcotte said. "There is no substitute for customer intimacy and fundamental business development and marketing activities to intelligently pursue new business. In these trying times, your value proposition better be centered around a very strong ROI and bulletproof financial justification, or you will be sorely disappointed."

Even health care has its drawbacks -- especially now, after the president's ill-fated appointment of Tom Daschle, HHS is presently without a firm hand on the tiller.

"The secretary has so much vision over the culture and themes that the department goes after," Potter said. "With health IT, the Obama administration has been very vocal, so I think from one level, everyone already knows it has the White House's support and that'll take some pressure off. But I think the delay in having an HHS secretary means that some of the funding some agencies will get very quickly may not come to the HHS offices quite so quickly."

"It does matter. They've lost momentum there, too, because the incumbent has left," Bjorklund said. "I think the institutional momentum is there. Whether you have enough leadership at the secretary and undersecretary levels -- whether senior leadership is there to keep momentum going -- there are going to be statutory requirements about the speed in which this money is to be spent. [HHS] might be like a lot of agencies that suddenly have this bag of money arriving on their doorstep, and a lot of them don't have a real clue how to execute it in a short time frame."

"That's not to denigrate the agencies themselves," he added. "To the House's credit and the Senate's, too, they've chosen to piggyback on a number of existing programs so there won't have to be a lot of new starts."