Capgemini brings on new leadership in federal arena

Capgemini Government Solutions LLC has a new president and chief executive officer and she's vowing to double the unit's size over the next 12 months.

Val Lyons, who took the reins in March, told Washington Technology that Capgemini's government group will concentrate on building its solutions offerings in five areas: health, finance, logistics, human resources and technical services consulting, such as enterprise architecture and knowledge management.

Capgemini Government Solutions, Vienna, Va., was established in August 2002 as subsidiary of Capgemini, the global technology consultancy headquartered in Paris. Lyons declined to reveal the government group's annual revenue, but said it has 35 employees.

Lyons also said she intends to more than double the group's revenue over the next 12 months.

The government unit's strategy is to tap resources from its parent company's North American operations, based in New York, while partnering with other companies already established in the government IT marketplace, Lyons said. By drawing on the company's broader resources, the government group can bring commercial best practices to its customers, she said.

"Our strategy to penetrate this market was not to build a big corporation ? but to build marketing initiatives," Lyons said, adding that the nature of the federal marketplace is such that companies pair up on some bids, but compete against each other on others. But "we consider ourselves to not be as nearly a threat to our partner systems integrators (as some others) because of our business model [that] draws from Capgemini's leading practices, tools and methodologies and to partner primarily with systems integrators that have domain knowledge and past performance," she said.

The company has teamed with larger IT firms, such as Northrop Grumman Corp. and Science Applications International Corp. for government contract wins in military health and the Army, respectively. Capgemini is also teaming up with Unisys Corp. on state Medicaid opportunities, but hasn't won any contracts yet.

Last September, the company, then called Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Government Solutions, received a one-year task order with two one-year options from the Army's Enterprise Integration Oversight Office to identify an enterprise integration framework that would incorporate all the Army's departments. The departments included finance, operations, accounting and financial management, human resources management, acquisitions and procurement, technical infrastructure, logistics, real property and environmental liabilities, and programming, budgeting and funds control.

In February, Capgemini's government group received a five-year blanket purchase agreement potentially worth $25 million from the Homeland Security Department for project management support services.

Capgemini's government unit has also won smaller contracts from the Health and Human Services Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Lyons said.

The company will continue looking for new contracts from the agencies it already has worked for, especially in the Defense and Homeland Security departments and some civilian agencies, she said.

Lyons replaces Bob Patton who left Capgemini in March to become president of Gartner Consulting.

Before joining Capgemini, Lyons was an executive vice president at Identix Inc., a biometric technology company. Before Identix, Lyons was president of Sytel Inc., an enterprise network services and e-business solutions company, where she worked until January 2001.

Lyons also spent 18 years at EDS Corp., where she became president of EDS' government services unit, overseeing marketing, sales and delivery to civilian agencies in the federal government.