August 2020

MEET 1901 GROUP: Brendan Walsh

SVP Partner Relations

“I have the best job in the company because I get to split my time equally between public speaking, writing, and interacting with external audiences, and supporting internal audiences with our sales team, marketing team, engineering team, operations team and executive management team.”

 

– Brendan Walsh

Why are the partnerships that 1901 Group has important to how we support the public sector?

Conducting business in the U.S. public sector is complicated due to the seemingly unlimited combinations of agency technical requirements, program objectives, acquisition considerations, and security and compliance regulations for each and every customer opportunity. It is crucial to have well-established relationships with select partners that you trust, so that when one solicitation requires a specific technology capability, and another solicitation requires a certain GWAC or socio-economic prime, then we can assemble the best team with the highest probability to win for each deal.

How will partnerships with education, industry, and government evolve in the future?

A very timely question. Our 1901 Group Team is heavily vested in supporting partnerships with education, industry, and government in order to help prepare and empower the Next-Gen of IT professionals. So, when we consider what is known more formally as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and its growth of the Internet of Things (IOT) and the adoption of cloud computing, we all must understand how the 4IR has dramatically altered how the world communicates. Not to mention the frantic changes we have seen over the past six months due to the global COVID-19 pandemic – forcing even faster change as many shift to remote learning and remote work as what is becoming the new normal. As a result, 1901 Group is actively supporting new public-private partnerships such as VAReady (https://VAReady.org), and private training and reskilling initiatives such as AWS re/Start (https://aws.amazon.com/training/restart/) that are bringing training to rural communities. Now more than ever, unemployed Virginians and those displaced from jobs due to COVID-19 need these crucial new skills in order to enter the IT job market. These programs offer a wide assortment of virtual self-paced training, and instructor-led virtual and in-person training with the goal to not only help Virginias get skills for good jobs, but for thriving careers.

As you are communicating with customers and partners regularly, what are the
biggest challenges facing the public sector today?

There seems to be three (3) themes rising above other challenges for public sector today and the top 3 are: 1) How do agencies reallocate resources from O&M contracts so that they can allocate more funding towards application migration and enterprise IT modernization? — Our answer is the Cost Neutral Cloud Journey (CNCJ); 2) How do agencies shift from traditional IT contracts (T&M and Cost Plus) to true managed services contacts that incorporate people (labor), processes, technologies, and facilities under more subscription-based or Firm Fixed Price (FFP) structures? – Our answer can be seen in our FFP and consumption-based CLINS in our GSA Schedule 70 catalog; and 3) How do agencies leverage FedRAMP authorized platforms and services to streamline cloud migration and to reduce costs and time associated with system accreditations? – Our answer is proven experience leveraging the 1901 Group FedRAMP authorized system (In3SightTM) with our partners’ complementary FedRAMP authorized services.

What excites you about 1901 Group and what do you think gives it the competitive edge?

Wow, we don’t have enough time to cover this question completely, but, here are a few things that both excites me about 1901 Group and gives us our competitive edge: 1) Realizing the Vision – Our CEO, Sonu Singh, knew that we wanted to build a company that would disrupt the status quo of how governments consume enterprise IT. And now, 10 -years later, we are doing exactly that by helping our government customers modernize their IT and migrate to the cloud, 2) Creating high tech jobs in rural America – We have created hundreds of IT jobs in our Enterprise IT Operations centers in Southwest Virginia and we plan on creating many more in the years to come, and 3) Establishing a culture of creativity and innovation – We believe in investing in training and ‘growing’ our people through training and continued education, which is a win:win for staff who have the desire to learn and advance their IT skill sets and careers, and we reward innovation by our people utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (MI), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and business process automation.

Brendan leads our partner relations and management efforts and supports business development activities in addition to establishing strategic business alliances with leading cloud service providers and security solutions.

Brendan is also focused on service design, IT as a Service modeling, public sector account management, and developing strategic alliances. Brendan brings over 25 years of sales, marketing, and program management experience to our team, including the successful prosecution of a business process patent during his tenure with FedBid.com. Brendan is a proud Georgia Tech (the real Tech) Yellow Jacket alum and ACC fan.

 Follow Brendan on LinkedIn

 

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