GiGi Schumm,
Vice President and General Manager, Public Sector, Symantec Corp.

Some vendors focus on just a piece of the puzzle, whereas Symantec has a broader view. Symantec is a global leader in backup technologies, for example, and for many years our technologies have been used in outsourced or hosted environments. We have many large partners who use our backup technologies for their customers ’ data, and we have an online backup service that currently has around 9 million customers. We believe we have the largest cloud-based infrastructure that’s been built for that application.

So, we speak from the vantage point of a company who uses cloud services to run its business, that already delivers security and backup services via the cloud. Some 15 percent of our total revenue, or around $1 billion, will be from cloud-based offerings in the next five years. We already have a broad spectrum of cloud-enabling technologies to help agencies to store, manage and backup their data.

Tom Ruff,
Vice President, Public Sector, Akamai Technologies, Inc.

Most vendors focus on a specific set of cloud capabilities, such as Software-as-a-Service, (SaaS) Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and X-as-a-Service (XaaS). Akamai provides capabilities in all of these areas, but our true differentiator is that we provide application acceleration services that overlay all of these capabilities which promote end user adoption and drive a better application experience.

We deploy compute power out to the edge of the cloud which eliminates bottlenecks on the Internet. By providing content at the edge closest to the end user’s access to the Internet we can offer enormous scale, avoiding common connectivity issues faced by many of our competitors.

Richard W. Johnson,
Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions

We are an integrator and aggregator, so we don ’t characterize ourselves as a vendor. We provide technology and create alliances, and in the case of cloud computing we have reached out to some of the top industry vendors and providers of infrastructure and services which allows us to tailor cloud solutions for our customers.

We know our customers need more than a one-size-fits-all solution, and that we have to meet their needs for affordability and security and their mission requirements. And that’s what we believe we are the best at, and what separates us from others in the marketplace.