WT approaches a watershed moment

The last week or so I feel like I’ve been under a self-imposed radio silence. Several large projects are converging at once, so I’ve had a focus more on those than day-to-day happenings in the market.

I still need to dive into the details of the Government Accountability Office’s decision to sustain IBM’s protest of the contract award to Amazon. As I’ve written before, I think the contract, no matter who the winner is, is a watershed moment for the government’s use of the cloud. Maybe tomorrow.

Washington Technology also is reaching a watershed moment and that’s why I’ve been heads down and isolated the last week or so.

Three things have crowded my plate:

• Publication of the 2013 Top 100, which went live last week. More profiles and analysis of companies is on the way.
• Prepping for next week’s Top 100 webinar.
• And finally, publication – next week, fingers crossed – of our first WT Insider Report.

The report is an important milestone for our new Insider membership model. It’s a tangible sign that we are dedicated to providing unique and value insights into the government market.

The report explores the relationship between prime contractors and their subcontractors and is available only to our Insider members.

We look at the relationship from the subcontractors’ point of view. We gathered honest feedback – sometimes brutally honest – about how subs feel they are treated by primes and what they want most from the relationship with their primes.

The report has scorecards for 20 of the largest prime contractors in the market and explores a range of attributes for each.

Participants in the study also volunteered insights about the positives and negatives of forming strong partnerships with primes and the challenges the prime-sub relationship faces going forward.

This report is just part one. Later this summer, in part two, we’ll continue our exploration of partnering but this time from the prime contractors’ perspective.

And finally, we’ll get customer perspectives by talking to agencies about how they view the services they are getting from contractors.

We have a lot more work to do to flesh out parts two and three of our Insider Report series, but I don’t think you’ll be disappointed in the results if part one is any indication.

Our goal when we started our membership model was to find a sustainable business model that would let us improve how we provide news, analysis and information.’

This blog is a bit of a plug to become an Insider if you haven’t already. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. We are off to a great start with more to come.