The government market has been one of the few bright spots for the channel in recent years, but solution providers are concerned that state, local and federal IT spending may begin to ebb in the near future.
At Everything Channel's Xchange Public Sector 2011 conference in Jacksonville, Fla., this week, one of the big topics on many VARs' minds was the coming budget crunches and how deficits will affect IT projects. Compounding the concerns for federal solution providers is Thursday's news that Vivek Kundra, the first CIO in the history of the U.S. government, will leave his post in August.
Kundra, a tech savvy member of the Obama administration, was respected among many in the channel for his support of cutting edge technology solutions such as cloud computing and virtualization. One of Kundra's major initiatives was pushing data center consolidation for the federal government and reducing the vast number of data center in order to save billions of dollars.
With Kundra's departure, will data center consolidation and cloud computing take a back seat in Washington? Will the budget hammer knock out many of the IT enhancement projects on the board, from security infrastructure upgrades to mobile computing? And if federal IT spending is curbed, where are some of the potential bright spots for government-focused VARs?
CRN's Rob Wright and Chad Berndtson discuss these topics and more as they discuss the government IT market. Berndtson reports from Xchange Public Sector and explains what's on the minds of government VARs right now.
Listen to the latest CRN Podcast and the government budget crunch and how it will affect solution providers.
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