Top 100: CACI sees Six3 deal paying off in new business

Over the past 18 months, CACI International has successfully tackled a more complex, budget-strapped federal marketplace with a simple but targeted plan: boldly go after new business, deliver operational excellence to existing customers and spend cash to acquire new customers and skills in select market areas that company officials believe are growing in relevance.

These areas include cybersecurity, health care, business solutions and command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR).

The result? CACI is ranked No. 12 on the Washington Technology Top 100 list of federal contractors, with $2 billion in prime contracts earnings. To date in 2015, CACI has captured a record number of contracts despite making fewer bids.

“We’re showing that despite sequestration and lower budgets, there are still some growing areas inside of the federal space and if you focus hard enough on them and make sure that you’re properly organized, trained and equipped for them, then you can still be quite successful in this business,” said Ken Asbury, president and CEO of CACI.

Asbury said that CACI has also begun reaping significant benefits from its $820 million acquisition of Six3 Systems, a leading provider of digital signal processing, cyber security and precision geo-location capabilities to the intelligence community. CACI acquired the company in late 2013 but finally completed the integration of business processes and systems in July 2014.

“We had many of those same capabilities already, but bringing on Six3 really just took us to the next level,” Asbury said. “We’re now able to take their capabilities into our traditional customer channels, such as the Army and Navy, and CACI is able to develop a bigger presence inside of the intelligence market where Six3 had a strong presence. We feel like we’ve significantly improved the win probability of C4ISR contracts by having Six3’s expertise and experience on board.”

As an example, in April, CACI won the five-year, $5.2 billion Global Intelligence Supports Services contract to provide a broad range of intelligence support, including C4ISR, logistics and material readiness, as well as big data management and analytics, to the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) at Fort Belvoir. CACI has been supporting the U.S. Army for more than a decade, but having the added Six3 capabilities helped it finally gain entry into the intelligence side of the branch.

Around the same time, CACI further bolstered its C4ISR credentials by acquiring LTC Engineering Associates, Inc., a highly specialized provider of technical engineering solutions and cybersecurity and communications intelligence to the intelligence and DoD communities.

Asbury said the LTC deal is a perfect follow-on and synergistic to the Six3 acquisition because it adds innovative and complementary security and communications capabilities needed to counter (and enable) cyberwarfare, electromagnetic disruptions to critical infrastructure and institutions and other evolving national security concerns.

“That’s an area and a market that we are only scratching the beginnings of, but we think it’s going to be significant,” he said.

Other key awards that CACI captured in 2014 and early 2015 include a five-year, $182 million prime contract to provide integrated logistics and acquisition support to the Naval Sea Systems Command Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems; a $149 million task order to support the Joint Improved Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) Attack the Network mission, which enables special operations units to disrupt and defeat violent extremist networks utilizing IEDs; and a three-year, $86 million task order to provide engineering and technical support to the U.S. Army’s Software Engineering Center.

Moving ahead, Asbury thinks that government budgets are finally beginning to stabilize, though he remains concerned over the slowness of the contracting process and the growing prevalence of a protest culture. “We’ve prevailed in the vast majority of protests that we’ve faced, and it’s great to win them, but it’s tough to go through that protest cycle,” he said. “I think that’s the biggest challenge in the marketplace today.”

Still, CACI will continue its successful three-pronged approach of going after new business, exceeding the expectations of existing customers and strategically buying new skills and access to critical markets.

“We’re executing extremely well in all three of those areas, and we expect that to continue,” Asbury said, noting that they’re also looking to fulfill a growing agency need for innovative solutions that help drive down the cost of operations and maintenance of core assets and enable them to do more with less. “The opportunities are there. Our ability to win is there. And so we are currently planning on and expect to return to organic growth in FY2016.”