Moving Ideas to Mission Outcomes

Sean and Brian kick off the inaugural episode of The GIST of Govt IT, and they're diving into why speed and real results are suddenly the only things that matter in federal IT, what's actually exciting in first response tech, and which consumer tech trends are about to hit the public sector harder than anyone expects. Then they turn to their big bets of 2026, where app modernization, AI, and data strategy are colliding into one massive shift, all riding on the infrastructure overhaul that's been put off for way too long. Finally, they discuss what the government is deprioritizing and deemphasizing when it comes to IT investments. Sean gets roasted about what car his wife will let him buy next.
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RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Conferences & Events
- Government Business Executive Forum (GBEF)
- EDGE@ces — GBEF's annual summit at CES

Government Design & Modernization
- America by Design initiative 
- National Design Studio
- Joe Gebbia — first U.S. Chief Design Officer
- Executive Order: "Improving Our Nation Through Better Design"

Industry Acquisitions Discussed
- ServiceNow to acquire Armis ($7.75B)
- IBM completes acquisition of Confluent ($11B)

Industry Partners & Communities
- ATARC — Advanced Technology Academic Research Center
- ATARC Working Groups (Zero Trust, Agentic AI, Cyber AI Convergence)
- Armis
- Dragos — OT cybersecurity

OT, Cybersecurity & Frameworks
- Purdue Model for ICS Security
- NIST SP 800-82 — Guide to Operational Technology Security
- NIST SP 800-53 — Security and Privacy Controls
- CISA — Industrial Control Systems resources
- CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model

Government Data & Open Policy
- Federal Data Strategy
- Data.gov

The Hosts
- Swish Data
- GIST 360

CONNECT WITH US

Got an idea for a future episode? Want to be a guest? Let us know.

Brian Lake - blake@swishdata.com

Sean Applegate - sapplegate@swishdata.com

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or gist360.com.

Transcript

Introduction to the Podcast and Hosts

Brian Lake 0:01

Two friends, nearly 50 years of combined experience in government IT, an old Marine and an old marketer who've had a whole lot of late night conversations about technology over bourbon and wine that probably should have been recorded. And now they finally are. Welcome to the gist of government IT. On today's episode, Vegas, baby, but not like you may think, we're going to break down insights from this year's GBEF summit, where every attendee walked away saying velocity matters. We're going to talk about drones beating first responders to the scene. And we're going to discuss five bets we're making on where federal IT goes in 2026. So the question is, can the government finally move as fast as the technology and innovation around it? To answer it, you know what we got to do. Let's get down to the gist of it. Welcome to the Gist of Government IT, your weekly insights from the intersection of technology and the mission. I'm your host, Brian Lake, and as always, I'm joined with my co-host, Mike Ampadre, the CTO Extraordinaire and the old Marine himself, Mr. Sean Applegate. Hey Sean, how are we doing? Welcome. Uh the Gist of Government IT, episode one of one. I can't believe we're here.

Sean Applegate 1:26

I'm excited, Brian. We've been talking about doing this for many a year. Many a year. And now we finally jumped off the the building and we're flying towards the ground, and hopefully we don't hit it.

Brian Lake 1:35

I hope we miss the ground for sure. Hopefully we'll fly here. So uh by way of introduction, everybody, welcome to the Gist of Government Technology podcast. Uh, this is Sean and Brian. Uh, you know, my Brian Lake. I'll be your co-host here with my colleague Sean Applegate. Uh Sean, you know, let's give the folks back home a little bit of intro as who you are and uh what we're doing.

Sean Applegate 1:56

Absolutely. So I've you know I'm an old Marine, five years in the Marine Corps, kind of in the MuSock space, high speed, low drag, moved that into government contracting, worked for a bunch of Northern California tech companies for years in different technical leadership positions, and then came to Swish about nine years ago to be the chief technology officer and uh get my hands dirty solving government problems. Yeah, it's been a bit of blast.

Brian Lake 2:16

So Sean and I, by so if you don't know, I've been working together for a bunch of years. Uh, I am a recovering PR hack, you know, realized a long time ago that uh needed to be closer to the sales process and help uh help guys tell really compelling stories. But 22 years in uh in the government marketing space, you know, telling compelling stories and talking about how technology solves government problems. Uh so been here at Swish as the VP of marketing for a little over a year now, and finally we're here with this podcast that you and I have been talking before we were at Swish, right? So, you know, just from a perspective here, you know, we we really want to try to have a podcast that delivers insights, you know, from the intersection of technology and the mission, like what we live and breathe every single day here within the Beltway and beyond, you know, focusing on how government technology

The Importance of Community in Government Technology

Brian Lake 3:06

is, you know, driving missions forward. So we're hoping that we can bring discussions that provide context and clarity and really just have candid conversations about the issues that are shaping government technology. Uh, but you and I, we've been doing we're lifelong friends, man. I'm so excited to be here with you, you know, be able to move beyond the late night conversations with bourbon and wine around this and into the podcast studio. So, you know, why would why now? I guess is the big question, Sean. Why, why do we care?

Sean Applegate 3:34

Yeah, absolutely. So I, you know, we've uh been working on just as a community for a number of years, and it's it's continued to grow and be successful. And we want to take it from being more of a large uh in-person event or a series of events last year on the road to to being a community where we can learn together, share thoughts, and ideally have a bigger impact on the mission at the end of the day. And that that impact is important, and we take that very, very much to heart at the end of the day. And so I think in this case, the the GIS 360 podcast is really laser targeted at the IT leaders, the enterprise architects, the IT managers, really the practitioners leading those teams. And we'll have a number of them on the show down the road. And we they've been participating in GIST since 2023 at a leadership level, and and hopefully we have a much bigger impact on that in the future.

Brian Lake 4:19

Yeah, I mean, I think that the biggest thing that I've also always found, especially we've struggled with, and I think the industry as a whole struggles with often is that these conversations around technology are often siloed. You know, innovation without strategy or strategy without execution to really get to the right technology solutions that are solving government problems. So, you know, really focusing on from gist as our program and then the gist of government technology here in the podcast is you know, connecting the dots in real time with the people that are living and driving these government missions forward. So um, you know, what what is the what you know, the folks for that are listening and watching at home or on the road or on your commute or stuck on the beltway, and you know, what what you're gonna get is conversations that move that talk about moving ideas to outcomes, right? And ultimately, what's gonna be driving these government missions forward? So, you know, a couple different segments of this podcast, we'd like we like to talk about what's top of mind. You know, what did we see and hear in a you know recent period of time uh that's really kind of driving um, you know, some of the conversations right now in the government technology space. So on that note, I know you just returned from uh Las Vegas not too long ago. Uh you were at GBEF, the Government Business Executive Forum. Great organization, been around for 20 plus years, 30 plus years. I over over 20. Over 20. I know they've been doing I know they've been doing their conference for over 21 years, and it's in in conjunction with the CES conference out in Las Vegas. So it brings government leaders, political appointees, industry stakeholders together. And it's it's always in in January, right? So it's always kicking off the year, talking about some of the latest and greatest that's gonna be happening. What are the conversations, the technology and the priorities of the government moving forward for

Key Themes from GBEF Conference

Brian Lake 6:07

the year? So, you know, what really stood out from the conference for you this year? You know, what's getting the most attention? Um, you know, what actually is gonna be mattering for what's gonna be happening and planning for this year and fiscal year 26?

Sean Applegate 6:18

Yeah, for fiscal year 26, when we think of the government mission, the one thing that was loud and clear was velocity matters. Speed of the mission is important, pacing uh and leading at a at a global level is important, and delivering real results for the citizens in the country are top of mind. So whether that was folks on the civil service side, the homeland security side, the justice side, the department of war side, those things and themes were very consistent. I think the other thing too, the a lot of the leaders when you think of the CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, were really focused on measurable outcomes. And so real hardcore analytics, one of the great data points, and we'll talk more about this later. Uh, Sunil, a CTO of CVP, really pointed to things like, hey, we're using AI to innovate quicker because we can use generative AI to write code at a X multiple. Sure. And my there's most senior architects were the most important folks to leverage, they're getting huge returns on investment by doing some simple things that the commercial enterprises has been using maybe a little bit longer, but they're not, they're not waiting. They're moving pretty quick and getting measurable results. And they're able to pull that through and then they think about how they measure the the actual level of work done and the quality of the work, which is important. And we want to be able to move fast and quality matters. And so it's not just about being more, but doing it effectively. I think that also pivots into from an accountability perspective. A lot of the folks we've seen are functioning more like a business owner than maybe a bureaucrat to some degree. And so they're making some decisions that may be not popular, but there may be a little more focus on, again, measurable KPIs for the organization or their team or department. And they want to make sure they deliver a really good result for the taxpayer's dollar. When you think of a CEO, they often don't survive long, you know, tens of years if they don't make it a good result. They don't spend their money wisely. I think a lot of them think of the taxpayers' money within their department as you know, their own, their own dollars they need to spend in a way that's effective in many cases.

Brian Lake 8:11

Trevor Burrus, Jr. So kind of uh a little bit, a lot of that boardroom accountability that you're getting in industry is starting to now bleed over into the government. Yeah. Yeah. Are these is this direct result of uh new thinkers coming in, you know, business executives coming into the government with this administration, or is this just been something that's been brewing for many years that's finally starting to come to ahead?

Sean Applegate 8:34

I think I think I mean I think it spinks to the administration being a little different than than anyone that's been there before, potentially. Uh but I think at the end of the day, a lot of the folks that are that we've seen have been around a long time, I think they do have secretaries of their agencies that maybe are a little more boardroom background than bureaucracy background to some degree. And so I think that's been a different uh level of leadership with maybe asking different questions and giving them good air cover for them to make good fast moving decisions and and have their back. And I'm not saying it's perfect by any means. There's a lot of turmoil in the government, like like many years, maybe more than most. But some of the results we're seeing on the technology side of things, and a lot again,

Innovations in First Response Technology

Sean Applegate 9:12

a lot of the technology leaders that that we've seen in these agencies aren't new to the government, but then around February, sure. The way they're able to operate and move faster is maybe a little bit different.

Brian Lake 9:21

Right. I mean, I think that's something they've been probably desiring for many years. Uh now having that air cover coming in from the top from leaders, from the leadership of the agencies and from the administration, from OMB, from GSA, uh is probably great. Did you see any uh was there any sort of kind of general theme from a technology standpoint at this con at at GBF at Edge that you were carrying through in most people's conversations? I I know you mentioned AI, uh data analytics integration.

Sean Applegate 9:49

Outside of that, I would say the thing we are we did see at the GBF Edge event, which is aligned with CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, a lot of drone, a lot of like physical AI stuff in general in Vegas that week. But the GBF did this really cool like drone mocked up scenario and ran everybody through it so you could kind of see a first responder where it's a drone is first responder. How do you use the technology on the drones, the cameras, the sensors, the collaborations so that the humans have a much much more real-time feed into things, more intelligence to do do this? And some more probably one of the most important things we saw, and these are these are law enforcement professionals at like the sheriff in city level in many cases, or or fire. The drone gave on the phone, gave the first responders a direct view into what's going on before they got there. So they get there. When they're on site, right, they have a good clarity of picture and they make wise decisions, and then often they get new viewpoints they wouldn't otherwise have on maybe a car wreck that they need to go kind of respond to. Hey, is it on fire before we get there? I mean, and the fire department knows that before they get there, or or is it maybe you know in a weird spot and they gotta know that, hey, we gotta whip whip out some different tools to go recover the car. Obviously, not everything's a a a car crash, but as a former marine operator, I really appreciate the ability to have good intel before you show up and get surprised.

Brian Lake 11:04

Right. I mean, uh I was driving to the office yesterday and uh I don't we I don't actually know what happened because I couldn't see any smoke, but massive amounts of fire trucks just started exploding onto the scene and trying to get to the site that they were going, and traffic would, you know, pause, you know, uh open up, make room, and then they would get through. But then the next thing you know, another another vehicle was coming through. And it's very start-stop. I mean, but uh thinking about a drone that has the ability, like single line of sight, nothing in its way, getting there, being able to capture imagery and start feeding back real time to those operators before they get there sounds incredible and amazing to think about from not just from first responder standpoint, but as you mentioned, you know, great use cases in the United States military, I'm sure across the government they can probably see that. So really, really interesting thinking around that. Now, where would that be like thinking about that and taking that threat pulling that thread a little further? You know, is that ownership going to be within, you know, that state and local municipality or the the county uh first responder organization? I mean, are they gonna own the assets or is there work to be done with the FAA on trying to kind of regulate kind

Consumer Technology Trends from CES

Brian Lake 12:11

of thinking about how to work through that?

Sean Applegate 12:13

But there's coordination with the A where they have to comply with some of the the laws where they can and can't fly things and who can operate them and who can't. So think of this, you have to have a a certified licensed pilot to do that, or an approved licensed drone, and that drone has limitations on what it can do autonomously as well. So there's a lot of policy around that. The nice thing is there are these drone as first responder services you can go find in industry now where a police department can pay a monthly fee for drones to put them in different spots and go integrate those into their enterprise command center and launch those and they can fly somewhat autonomously. So it's not a manual pilot, it's often a autonomously driven pilot thing onto a scene to a target, shoot the camera video automatically, and then the human can adjust if they need to. So it's come a long ways in just a short amount of time. I think it does speak to things like physical AI, robotics, data feeds being integrated as command centers become really important. And that's that's an area we'll maybe talk about a little bit later. But uh data is the new oil, if you will. And in many cases, the data is out there. How do we get it integrated? How do we use it? How do you make it in intuitive for a human to see it, or maybe an agent in the future to use it are uh not panaceas anymore. They're very achievable, but it but it does take real engineering work to coordinate that and execute it and then prove it over time.

Brian Lake 13:29

Yeah, and then I know we will mention a little bit, we'll talk about this a little later, but kind of finally breaking down those silos so that data can truly be integrated and accessed is going to be really critical for the future of this kind of space as well. So uh, you know, and I gotta ask, because it is tied to CES, you know, and if folks, if you don't know what CES is, the consumer electronic show, it's uh it is the it's the big big event of the year. So I know you had had a chance to break away and kind of walk the floor. Was there any cool uh, you know, other non-government technology that you saw that really kind of struck you as something that's gonna be hitting the shelves, you know, maybe later for Christmas, you know, for later on down the year, or something that's gonna be pretty cool from a consumer standpoint?

Sean Applegate 14:09

From a consumer standpoint, the these glasses called Rocket, and they have augmented reality, virtual reality, real-time language translation. They the company is in San Francisco, and I think the glasses are manufactured in Taiwan, but those are you know, I don't know, four or five hundred bucks. They look really cool. I haven't bought a pair yet, but they were on my sh my short list of like maybe I go get those next. I did buy uh a nice uh CarPlay add-on so I could do the Bluetooth CarPlay in my old Honda Civic finally. Oh, really? So no more uh putting the tape that's connected to your I don't have to I don't have to use a cord to plug into my iPhone anywhere to connect to a radio to do car play. It was the I bought the car primarily because it was the first year the the Honda had CarPlay in it, and my my daughter

Federal IT Predictions for 2026

Sean Applegate 14:54

crashed my previous car that weekend. I had to go buy something pretty rapidly, and there weren't many options with CarPlay. So as a technologist, I was like, I have to have CarPlay because I live off of my phone, whether it's phone calls on the road, audio books, podcasts, I shouldn't say text message, but you can do I can do texting and I can do video, I could do audio based text messages on the on the with CarPlay, which is nice. So unfortunately, I spend way too much time in the car between homework client sites.

Brian Lake 15:18

Episode one of one, we've already got a disclaimer that we got to add to the end of the show. No tech drive driving. Unless you do it verbally. It is always it always amazes me when you think about the integration of technology into things like cars. You know, it's a big investment. You know, you're super excited about it. And I I've ran into this with my Prius as it had the built-in navigation, and then literally six months later, Google Maps drops and it's completely obsolete and it takes forever to punch in the address on the car. And it's like uh it's something I paid thousands of dollars extra for and then immediately didn't use, right? So uh it is it's it's always interesting to see how the integration of these technology now that they have the the these these have the ability to update it, whereas the older, you know, physical technology you couldn't, right? I bring Brian that really speaks to the point of we both need to get new cars from here and here.

Sean Applegate 16:11

Yes, we have a kid graduating in college where he gets the hand-me-down, and now I finally get to go get my my dream car at some point. I have to figure out what that is still. So my wife and I have had some discussions around what I may may may be allowed to get, maybe not allowed to get.

Brian Lake 16:23

All right, all right. Well, on that note, so we we can talk we can talk about that offline. We'll get a nice couch, you can lay down, you can tell me more about you know what you are allowed and not allowed to do. Uh let's move into let's bring this back to technology because the folks are like, geez, Brian, Sean, guys, get to the point here. So it's the beginning of the year. You and I love to talk about the federal, you know, predictions, IT predictions, right? You know, we've done this, you and I have done this for several years. It's always interesting to see what actually plays out, where we missed. Um, we like to do mid-year updates. So, you know, would love to really kind of hear from you, you know, your top five IT priorities as you're seeing from the federal ecosystem for 2026, um, and where you think that, you know, organizations are taking bets, the administration is taking bets, things that you know are really going to be top of mind and be big drivers for government missions this year. Absolutely.

Sean Applegate 17:15

So I th I think off the top of my head, application modernization is here. And and we were just talking about you know the friction with the bad experience. U.S. government hired a chief design officer, Charlie Airbnb, one of the founders. And I think there'll be a big focus on how do we build modern applications that feel you know 21st century, consumer-like in nature, great experiences. And but to do that, right, it's it's hard to operate these at scale. Things like moving quick, making quick improvements, using modern libraries that are secure are important. And also being able to run those things at enterprise scale. When you're thinking of these shared service centers and the these high impact service providers and the agencies where they host applications that service millions of

The Role of AI in Application Modernization

Sean Applegate 17:54

citizens or millions of employees, really important to run those things well. So not just building a good CICD pipeline, building a good platform team for their development teams, but being able to do observability at scale, make sure that when things have problems, you're alerting real time and able to solve those things. And then eventually bringing in other new capabilities to be able to operate those contact centers, those mission uh applications at scale, things like either large language models or a gentec workflows are gonna be really important. Right. But but again, I think I think a lot's gonna start with more mission-focused innovation for the citizen, for the warfighter is kind of the anchor to move on. And then security hopefully comes along with that pretty rapidly.

Brian Lake 18:36

Well, with that, with that application modernization, you know, I I feel like in now our career we've gone from, you know, the you know, the waterfall development process to the agile development process. You know, what what role is AI going to be having in these this kind of modernization of these applications as agencies start exploring code to continue to ideate and develop and modernize the apps? Sure.

Sean Applegate 18:58

I think, you know, so so analytics and AI are probably the second big prediction, right? I think those will continue to grow. AI is having an impact on everything and everybody's life. I think that'll continue to accelerate. And we've seen a lot of work with agents in the last uh 30 to 60 days on the commercial side, moving very quickly with things like OpenClaw and others. But at the end of the day, I think you yay, you're gonna need a uh a GenTech LLM platform to build on top of in most of these agencies, and many of them have that and are taking it from an experiment in the last couple of years in small or small production use cases to large platforms that many parts of the mission can leverage. And that requires evaluating outputs and results, observing both the costs and the performance and tuning those things for good, good, reasonable balance, and then also securing those things, so using guardrails and advanced red teaming to make sure that what you eventually put in prod doesn't have a bunch of security holes in it because it's very different. We're dealing with things like non-deterministic um output. And so traditional ways we did security aren't always gonna work with the new way that we're we're thinking and doing things with IT systems, in this case AI and agents. So those are those are big challenges. I think they're also the way to think about it is how am I going to pick a general platform and use it for different business workflows versus how am I going to use AI inside of a IT system or maybe embedded inside of other other systems? So those are kind of the two big buckets we tend to see things in. And and generally speaking, in in federal, we see a lot of focus on cyber right now. So there's some industry A's coming up that um the executive office of the president's putting together in March. And those things, I think, are gonna bucket things in those same categories. Hey, how do I use do things with AI in a secure fashion? And then, for example, how do I use AI to do security better?

Brian Lake 20:38

Right. I mean, we're gonna have many multiple shows where we're gonna be talking and diving into AI because to your point, uh, it felt like 2025 was the year of where AI really hit the mainstream in the federal government, where it it wasn't just, you know, something conceptual, but actually starting to see those projects kind of actually be come to come to fruition. Uh, but you know,

Data Integration as a National Asset

Brian Lake 20:59

the other the other thing that's gonna be really interesting, I think, this year that I've been thinking a lot about is how do we ensure that these non-traditional government contractors that are driving a lot of this AI innovation are able to truly be able to get into the federal ecosystem, be really critical for these organizations to prove very quickly how to embed that IP into either enterprise solutions, into the agency's IT stacks, and really make sure that those innovations are aligned with those government missions and needs. And to your point, being proving the security, proving the bulletproofness if you're adding additional layers of vulnerability into the IT stack that has already got a lot of vulnerabilities as we've been moving to more of a zero trust approach across the government. Um, but I think you know, seeing hopefully see we're gonna probably see a lot more ATO usage and leveraging of that uh in 2026 as well. So um more to come from us uh around AI. But talk to me a little bit about. Like your third kind of like big bucket that you're seeing as from a prediction standpoint. Yeah.

Sean Applegate 22:04

One thing we do a lot of swish is data and and data feeds AI, it feeds decisions, feeds your business applications, and that often comes in many different shapes and sizes and variations. Probably one of the most important things is getting the value of that data unlocked. So what we call integrating that data. They are looking to make a lot more progress in the future, but getting that data joined intelligently is important. But again, just getting it out of the silos, getting out of a single siloed application database, in many cases is the first step. And there's lots of ways to do that. We're seeing, again, good tech innovations that make that easier and easier every day. And also the ways to clean and take care of making that dirty manageable. So, you know, get dirty data is bad. We need to make good data and polish the data as it comes into the system.

Brian Lake 22:53

Harp on this enough, how much data as a strategic national asset, really, you know, just as much as um, you know, weapons platforms and infrastructure and a lot of different areas, you know, a lot of different things that we're now that we're looking at data as a national asset, it is, it is it's it's pretty amazing to me because we've been talking about data silos for our entire careers, but actually seeing true silos being smashed and data being integrated, aggregated, and truly being analyzed in this kind of AI kind of future is really it's refreshing. It's exciting to see it actually happening. But I do I do agree, like, you know, data is gonna be really top of mind from a lot of different areas across the entire ecosystem this year.

Sean Applegate 23:39

Absolutely. And we have the open data policy, it's been around for a while to be open with our government's data to the citizens as well. So I think we're gonna see not only additional data sets published to the public, but I think we'll see the public diving into those things with a bit more critical thinking as well as they get interested in whether it's weather, the climate, as a whole.

Brian Lake 24:07

All right, so now we're on to four. Number four, what's your fourth biggest uh you know insight to what

Operational Technology and Infrastructure Modernization

Brian Lake 24:13

the year is going to be focused on?

Sean Applegate 24:14

Yeah, so I'd say in general, there's a lot of discussion around critical infrastructure and operational technology. And so this really speaks to the, hey, we have lots of great tech, it's getting modernized, there's lots of useful information in it. How do we take that operational technology, that real world physical thing, and get that data out to make better decisions? Whether that's uh things like IoT devices, uh as simple as a video camera or a mic or a conference room, or maybe your smart thermometer in a building that, and if you're GSA, you might have thousands of buildings you need to monitor the the temperature on, because if you adjust the temperature, you might save a lot of money on heating bills, for example. Those are those are you know small adjustments, but big savings potentially, right? When you think of real dollars. Um, so that's examples. Uh, when you look at JADC2 or sensors around the border if you're Homeland Security, getting the data out of those sensors aggregated, and then to uh democratizing that to the many of the different users and applications that need it as quick as possible is another great use case of OT. And so those are areas I again I think we're making a lot of progress as we look at that. There's really three main steps most organizations are going through. They're going to connect the OT. So they got to put the plumbing in, make sure they can connect it. It's reliable, it's resilient. Two, they have to protect the data. So if they connect these systems, they have physical impact in the real world. There are ways to kind of bucketize that impact and risk. But there is very different risk when you think of a manufacturing facility making artillery rounds or powder for an explosive in the Department of War. Or those HVAC systems in the data centers that we were talking about as we were driving up here in Ashburn, right? Exactly. So so those are those are attack vectors, but they they also can just have bugs and problems, and those things cannot just make them unavailable. It could physically hurt somebody in some cases. Right. And this is a big focus in the, for example, in the manufacturing industry for automobiles, or uh, if you're manufacturing big, big, large objects with machinery that moves, right? It's a press, for example. So those are the same concerns in in government that we have in commercial industry. And there are great ways to deal with that in the commercial industry. Those are things we're going to see that as a federal government matures in their OT adoption, they do those. The third piece of OT modernization normally is transform, which is, oh, they're connected, they're protected. What do I do now? Well, normally that's get the data off of them into either a business specific system for operating that environment, what's called an MES, for example, or into a data lake so then I can monitor what's going on. I can drive decisions. I might have agents make decisions on those things. So there's lots of ways to use the data, but that really gets back to how do we do the mission more efficiently? How do we make better decisions around beans, band-aids, and bullets, for example, and logistical insights. So lots of opportunity there. Some of those can be SaaS applications that are at massive scale. Some of those are custom applications just for the mission.

Brian Lake 27:00

What what up we've seen recently when you think about that Connect, Protect, Transform

Acquisitions and Consolidation in the OT Space

Brian Lake 27:05

Continuum? We've seen recently companies like Armist, for example, a partner of ours, great company. They f they fall in that Connect Protect kind of two categories. Recently just got announced that they've been acquired by ServiceNow. Um, you know, what is the implication for these types of applications or I'm sorry, these types of acquisitions in this space? Are we seeing are we going to see a consolidation in in the uh OT secure, you know, the OT space? Is it makes, I mean, from a platform perspective for ServiceNow, is this a natural fit? What are your thoughts around both this acquisition and what it could be for the industry as a whole?

Sean Applegate 27:40

Yeah, and I think Armis is an interesting company because they bridge IT and OT. So they're at a pure play. And I think that's a lot of the interest for someone like ServiceNow, because the the breadth of those two markets collectively is a lot larger total addressable market, which is good for their customers. If you think of OT consolidation specifically, a lot of that's very specialized. And those companies on the OT security side are very good at what they do. And what you'll find is the value from one of the security providers may be more appealing to certain vertical markets. For example, healthcare. Armist has very exceptional medical device OT security capabilities. Yeah. And they do very well in some of those healthcare verticals in the federal government, especially. If you look at industrial control systems or building management systems, there are other providers that are very specialized in those areas and have deep roots in other parts of the government where they maybe have hired people out of. Drago's an example of that one of our other partners. And so often I think the trick is if you're if you're a government agency, you need to understand what is your what is the OT technology you need to secure, what protocols does it use? Do I have a sensor at my disposal that is the best at what I needed to do for that type of OT technology? Because mileage will vary. And then normally the next question is how do I roll that data up and do my SOC operations for an OT security team, not just a traditional IT security team. That expertise on knowing the use cases and how to do instant response and deal with mitigating those risks are very different in an OT environment, using, for example, the Purdue model or NIST 882 than traditional IT controls like 853.

Brian Lake 29:15

Right. And just so folks know, we're gonna have a lot of those things in the show notes if you're not familiar with those requirements. And and part of my job is to always make sure we pull Sean out of the weeds when he gets too deep. But make sure you check the show notes if you're looking for further information around a lot of those mandates, those requirements, um, a lot of those control information uh uh and those and those models that we're referencing as well. So and I would, I guess I forgot to also mention like Confluent also just announced not too long ago they got acquired, they're getting acquired by IBM as well. So um, so all right, so um moving beyond OT, final prediction, Sean, the fifth prediction for you for this year.

Sean Applegate 29:51

Yeah, this one's often not very visible. So when we think of uh visible solutions, a lot of them we've we've just talked about, like executive leaders understand these things. Uh, you'll see the president

Deprioritization of Certain Government Initiatives

Sean Applegate 30:01

talk about in some cases, you know, they get business backing. Um, we think of line of business leaders. The the last one really is a big concern for typically your CIOs and the infrastructure leaders under them. And they aren't very visible to most government leaders outside of IT, but infrastructure modernization is really important. So when you think of we're gonna add OT data, we're gonna connect the OT, we're going to add a lot more real-time data from centers around the world. We're gonna need to move more data back and forth as these applications do more things. We're gonna layer agents on top of those that look like humans, and there may be more agents than humans at some point, but they again need to go use applications and move data and telemetry around to make decisions. Puts a lot of stress on that underlying network, the underlying compute that maybe need to be pulled out of the cloud and put to an edge site for regional processing at scale for lower latency, for somebody that happens to be maybe in that part of the world or or that local office where there's a lot of work. And so don't overlook the need for IT monetization. So routers, switches, firewalls, access points, distributed switching, edge compute, um, with maybe your own large language models running on that with a with a virtualization framework underneath it. Those are all things that are foundationally needed. So a lot like when you build a house, if you ever built a house, you might spend a good amount of time getting the permits in place and then laying and digging the foundation, putting it in. That's a ton of work to build a good foundation to build on. But if you have a really weak foundation, the house doesn't last real long. That general infrastructure, the IT infrastructure underneath, is the foundation for all the other things on top of it that need to run. We have to build good foundations. And in some cases, our foundations get old and they need a little bit of repair. That's kind of where we're at now.

Brian Lake 31:50

I'm assuming then all of this is also going to have that wrapper of artificial intelligence on top of it. How can we modernize this infrastructure by leveraging AI as well?

Sean Applegate 31:59

There are certainly uh improvements in running networks at scale where there are agents or or large language models or virtual assistants that exist to help you do those things from from most of the large providers. So I think the big thing is you have to transform how you operate some of these things. And there's awesome opportunities to do that. They're not required, but when you think of using your cash wisely as an IT leader, you know, could you streamline how you run your NOC, for example, or how you run the cloud? There's certainly opportunity for benefits there, but you you do need to make a conscious decision on are we going to change, how are we going to change, and then let's manage that change.

Brian Lake 32:34

Sure. So talk, we've we've talked about where we think we're prioritizing this year. Obviously, not everything can be prioritized. If if you're looking at what it what is the government deprioritizing or kind of pulling back from that have been major kind of initiatives over the past several years, obviously different administration coming in has different priorities. You know, give me uh, we don't have time for five, but give me like three areas where you think the government where we're going to be deprioritizing or we're not gonna be less emphasis and focus on.

Sean Applegate 33:02

Yeah, and when we say deprioritizing maybe, hey, it's there's not as much work to do there, but it's still important work in many cases, or maybe we pivot completely. But the first off, I think you're seeing a lot of transition away from kind of what was termed workforce transformation. And really what we're seeing now is this this we'll call upskilling for AI skills or data skills. That's pretty important. So that's kind of uh uh maybe a bit of a pivot. Human capital is super important, and we want people to do good work in the government, and we want some of the smartest and people to do that. And then in general, right, a lot of that's just providing good educational opportunities, give them the resources, give them air cover, give them time to focus on it, and then hopefully great results come from it. We're seeing a ton of people dig on dig in on data skills, on programming, learn to do BI work and do it fast and do it more efficiently. The the second, I think in general, the the general we heard a huge push the last couple years on customer experience, CX. I think the the focus may be on kind of you know embedding that just organically into your application experience and maybe less of a focus on CX, but a little bit more focused on design to some degree. We've got a new chief design officer coming in, but I think that's it maybe led a little more from the top down, maybe out to the agencies or focus on certain certain mission results. And then the third, again, not probably as much of a deprioritization, but general speaking, we've had a a ton of discussion around zero trust for a long time. A lot of agencies have good, strong zero trust foundations in place. This year is really about just kind of maturing those and improving those areas in most cases. So it's not as transformational. It's really about just, you know, turning on additional features, tweaking stuff, make sure they're running tight. But things like strong identities in place in most places, good zero trust network architectures are done. Those have had big impacts for agencies. So I think you're gonna see maybe a little more less, uh, a little bit of a defocus from that, and probably a more of a focus on how do we do security for AI, which feels very different. And honestly, it is, it is moving at an extremely rapid pace.

Brian Lake 34:53

I mean, we're and I know we've talked about that. We're gonna have a future show where we're gonna talk exactly about this topic, but the idea that these zero trust frameworks were written before AI hit the scene, and now it's it's it's we have to add that additional layer onto this. And agencies are content. They have just gotten to that point where they've feel like they've gotten made significant progress in zero trust, and then we throw a whole new curveball at them of like how we have to integrate this from that perspective.

Sean Applegate 35:18

So as a you know, Swish is pretty active in the community. We and we we enjoy being in the community. One of our our other memberships we're part of our association is Atark. And I would say the the discussion around agents and security around agents has kind of cross-cut a lot of the working groups. So it's interesting to see the not just the focus on it, which I think is a super interesting topic, but the ability for the working groups to do cross-coordination across the working groups, whether it's a zero trust working group and an agentic AI working group or or cyber AI convergence working group, for example.

Brian Lake 35:49

Yeah. Definitely, folks, if you haven't worked with ATARC before, great organization, really impactful in driving emerging technology and providing insight and guidance to both the federal government from industry and and the and government stakeholders that are collaborating on these issues, but real great partner of Swishes and I think of many organizations here in the space. I'm all right. So that's that's that's the show for today, right? I mean, that's you've given us the you've looked at the the tea leaves. This is the bets replacing. Folks, if you think we're if you think Sean's wrong, let us know. Send send us a note. Our emails will be in the show notes. It's gonna be a really great year to see, you know, how this plays out. Many of these topics we're gonna dive further into the course of the next several months and see where things shift. And obviously, uh, you know, I I don't think I've ever seen you bat, you know, a perfect, uh, a perfect number. So we'll see what actually kind of plays out and what comes to fruition. So um just from a from a perspective here, we do want to share, you know, listen, we're we're very excited about this podcast uh as part of our just pro our just 360 program. So, you know, thinking about what the future episodes are gonna be holding and be including, we're gonna have guests from both government and industry, people that have recently left government, that have recently joined industry. We're gonna be giving more of these deeper dives into these topics, what's working, what isn't. Um, you know, but idealistically, the GIS program isn't just a podcast. We're you know we're building a program that gives the government technology community a place to engage, to collaborate, to learn from each other, whether it's online, in person, you know, everywhere in between. But if you want to learn more about GIS 360, go to GIS360.com. We have upcoming webinars. We have upcoming in-person executive briefings, lunch briefings, breakfast briefings, networking happy hours where you know you can have a cold one with Sean and I, um, content market research. And if these topics resonate with you, if you like what you hear, click the like button, the subscribe button. I don't know what is that what the influencers all say, the podcast people say. Supposedly. That's what they say. We're new at this, guys. We'll get better at this as we go along. Um, you can go to gist360.com, go to Apple, go to iTunes, um, go to Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. Um, but if you're someone who lives in the mission, works in the mission, if you're in government or industry, let us know what you think. What do you want us to talk about? Do you want to be involved? Do you want to engage? We want to hear from you. Uh, so please let us know if you have ideas and topics or future shows. Sean, we did it. One of one done. The march to 100 shows is on now, right? So, you know, we're excited to be here. Excited to be with you, my friend. I'm glad we finally got this one off the ground. I I think we missed the ground. So let's keep trying to miss the ground. What do you say? Hey, Brian, it's been fun and an honor. So thanks for kicking me the ass so we finally get this first one in the in the books. Sounds like a plan, my friend. Well, we'll keep kicking and have a great day. Everybody looking forward to seeing you on a future show.