18 months ago, a short 2 months after G2Xchange Health had launched, we published a report with some fairly bold predictions about which new players we thought were well positioned to challenge for award on T4NG, on both the large and small front.
While we identified many of the eventual awardees as part of that report (e.g. Halfaker; TISTA, tiag, Ellumen, HMS, BITS and even that Lockheed (pre-SMS) would buy their way in), we will be the first to admit that we swung and missed in a big way on several of our predictions. That is especially true in the small category, with many of the current awardees not even making it onto our radar.
Over the next couple of weeks, G2X will break down the 21 T4NG prime award winners who are certain to be household names within the Federal Health IT community over the course of the next few years.
For this report, we will start with three firms, all of whom we recognized very early on that we had missed, but, in hindsight, were clearly well positioned.
Led by Dwight Hunt and Brad Palmer, B3 is by no means new to the VA, having initially served as a partner to T4 prime, 7 Delta, on a number of key VA programs such as the Elimination of Veterans Homelessness (EVH) initiative and the Enterprise Acquisition Systems Help Desk, but a key indication that B3 was bidding and would be a major player came in late 2014 when they added Industry Veteran, Bill Greaves from 7 Delta to serve as Vice President. B3 had clearly developed the types of relationships and insight that gave them a big advantage and they continued to prove they have what it takes with many key RTEP wins throughout 2015, as a key sub to Mantech, CACI and most recently, ProSphere. Having only recently acquired their HUBZone status, it will be interesting to see how B3 manages to keep that status in place as they are certainly poised to be one of the more competitive and fast growing SDVOSBs out of the gate.
Prior to founding AbleVets, Dr. Wyatt Smith, Founder and CEO and a board certified internist and pathologist, had developed quite a reputation as a health IT leader in the federal sector. This included time spent as Deputy CIO for the Military Health System (MHS) and, prior to that, as Commanding Officer for the Navy’s medical information technology command where he modernized many aspects of the Navy’s healthcare systems. Dr. Smith also served on the Presidential Task Force to Improve Health Care for Our Nation’s Veterans and played a strategic role as founder of several DoD/VA sharing initiatives. This experience has served AbleVets, an SDVOSB, well as they have been able to pick up several key awards at VA in support of VA system security, VHA applications hosting in the dedicated core cloud and mobile efforts in the areas of VA protocol based text messaging, scheduling enhancements and telehealth. While all new T4NG primes will greatly broaden their capabilities and offering over the new few years, AbleVets has several clearly defined areas of expertise that will set them apart from the competition.
Nester Consulting (dba GovernmentCIO) has taken a very smart and interesting route to end up as an SDVOSB T4NG prime awardee. Leveraging experience gained with both industry and as a Federal IT executive, CEO Brian Moran gave this young consulting firm a voice and a platform by publishing GovernmentCIO magazine. The opportunity for Brian and Sr. VP, William Giandoni to interview senior executives from across government, gain lessons learned and develop relationships along the way has undoubtedly served this group well. GovernmentCIO gained some early wins at VA in the right areas, including a 2012 award to assist the VA as part of their Agile implementation, which inevitably led to several more contract awards as the VA worked to transform their software development lifecycle (SDLC) to an Agile methodology. Government CIO has clearly established itself as a go-to partner as they have continued to expand their footprint, winning tasks in area such as 508 compliance sustainment and in support of the VA’s web-based Centralized Administrative Accounting Transaction System.
Up Next: Liberty IT, Favor TechConsulting and the ever stealthy Intelligent Waves.
Congratulations to the T4NG awardees as this was hard fought and well deserved. Now comes the real work.
