Federal Tech Podcast

March 28, 2023 Mike Weigand, Shift5 Today’s interview with Mike Wiegland from Shift5 highlights how commercial technology can assist warfighters on the battlefield.  Mike provides insight into how the commercial industry can help innovate with defense technology. He has a military and technical background and has real-world examples of how...

March 23, 2023 Brent Leech, MongoDB In the early days of the Internet, companies would design databases that could handle what they perceived as tremendous amounts of information.  Memory was expensive, so those databases were optimized to handle related pieces of information, or relational databases. They relied on a system...

March 14, 2023 Thomas George, Vidoori (Recorded at Monk’s BBQ, in lovely downtown Purcellville, VA) Leaders at NASA know the value of simulation.  Before the Rover was sent to Mars, designers ran it though many scenarios on earth. Of course, they couldn’t reproduce the climactic conditions on the Red Planet,...

March 9, 2023 Brian Baney, Aeyon (Recorded at Monk’s BBQ in lovely downtown Purcellville, VA) Many phrases are bandied about that give the impression that they will solve the world’s problems. You know them as well as I do:  artificial intelligence, machine learning, and even Robotic Process Automation. This is an...

March 7, 2023 Mike Beckley, Appian (Recorded at Monk’s BBQ, in lovely downtown Purcellville, VA.) Big problems need big solutions. Let us take a look at the Veteran’s Benefits Administration as an example. It has been reported that the VBA completed a record 1.7 million total claims in fiscal 2022. It...

March 2, 2023 Stephen Kovac, Zscaler Today’s interview focuses on how the commercial success of Zscaler and its hundreds of patents can help large military organizations reduce costs and increase security of a cloud transition. A good way to understand the challenges that the U.S. Army facing was by some...

February 28, 2023 Mike McPherson, ReliaQuest Reliaquest is a very successful commercial company, and it has a set of skills that can be directly applied to the federal government. Today’s interview is with Michael McPherson.  He worked for the FBI for over 25 years, and he chose to work for...

February 21, 2023 Zach Duncan, Pure Storage This was recorded at ElasticON Public Sector at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, D.C.) Federal technology leaders are pushed and pulled from many directions.  On the one hand, they are expected to produce solutions that respond instantly; on the other hand, they have...

February 14, 2023 Malcolm Davis, WWT (Recorded at ElasticON at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, DC) When you hire a moving company, they send out a representative and they do a survey of what is in your house and give you an estimate.  A much more difficult scenario is when...