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Eric Kavanaugh.
Well, all right, ladies and gentlemen, Hello and welcome back once again to the only coast to coast radio show that's all about the information economy.
It's called Inside Analysis.
You're true the Eric Kavanaugh is here, and folks I'm very pleased to be talking about a very serious subject today that is hiring in the federal government. We have Chris Coldegato today with us, and he is from fedstack and they're focused intently on this very challenge. And Chris, there are lots of things that need to get done in DC, as we all know, and you folks are
out there helping to make these connections. Tell us quickly about fedstack, what you guys were built for and what you're working on today.
Sure, thanks, Eric, so very quick on. Fedstack is actually a new brand very focused on the federal.
Market.
In fact, we are basically a unit that was worn out of a workforce development organization called smooth Stack. So this is actually a brand launch where we're actually expanding our offering from what we're pretty well known to have been doing.
In the market space until now.
So our focus has been how do we basically close in on the skills gap specific to technology, right, there's a lot of difficulty in hiring also in the federal space. There's also a lot of competition in the open market for pretty much the same pool of resources. So where we differentiate ourselves is we're actually what we were calling it creation of net new talent. Right. What that means is we actually develop the talent from sources where you
would not usually find them. Right. So a lot of new entrants into the technology market that have the high aptitude for grasping new technology, exiting military that would like
to break into the technology field. Basically, we created an accelerated apprenticeship program where we are secret sauce is being an immersive environment where we mirror the target environment for our clients, be that direct to the government or some of our system integrated partners where they're trying to meet a particular requirement.
Yeah, so the do training where it is intensive training and I'm presuming what you're doing is mimicking the work environment where they'll be so they work with the technologies that they'll need to be working with in the actual job.
Is that right.
That's correct.
So we actually have a patent pending on this technology for called mirror environment immersion.
Right.
So beyond just training them on the content, right, we really tailored the curriculum specific to that job. Right, So it's not just about training on one dimension, but really the full breadth of skill set that's required to deliver the job. For day one, So whether that's cloud, whether that's actual programming or even consulting skills and knowledge of
the domain where they're going to be deployed. So we really tailored environment specific to the requirement and then basically run them through anywhere from a ten to twelve week window against a full time, full time absorption of the material where we provide all the lab environments set up for that the trainers, the product owners mimicking and simulating what they would face when they actually work on day one.
Yeah.
Well, and there's lots of new technology to learn these days. Obviously, Artificial intelligence is very much top of mind for people. You have models that need to be designed, they need to be trained, You've got AI infrastructure to worry about. Do you cover that whole spectrum everything from the IT infrastructure to the model designed, the training, that kind of fun stuff.
Oh, absolutely right.
So we will focus on what is in need today and we actually continue to continue to scan the market of what's emerging. So we want to be able to stay ahead of what's coming. So we focus on five key areas right, data and AI. Right, So a lot of the data engineering, big data analytics and so on, a lot of the new AI models are coming out there, the traditional applications development regarding regardless of what stack that
may be UH, and then digital platforms. There's a lot of COTS packages, ERP packages for example, low code, no code type of technologies UH, including infrastructure solutions, cloud hybrid and so on, including the way we do DevOps for deployment and packaging all that UH into those target environment. And finally, of course, across the board, you need to have cybersecurity for secure applications and platforms.
Yeah, cybersecurity, I mean there's a space that will never ever ever go away. It's harder than ever, but you do have better tools than ever too. So how do you yourselves keep on top of the latest technologies? Do you hire consultants and practitioners from these environments? Let's just pick cybersecurity as one, because it's its own entity. Do you go out and get folks from the big firms to come on and be your trainers and your consultants?
How does that work?
So we have a pretty large partner network. So we partner both from a strategic alliance with the vendor providers for example. So we create those partnerships where we are basically seen as workforce providers, and then we basically look at those trainers or the experts experts from the various fields that we're trying to surface.
Right.
So, in fact, actual that's a good segue into the expansion of our offerings beyond creating this apprenticeship cohorts, where we're now actually extending our services to our partners, where some of the folks that they have that may have been working on the same maybe legacy applications that now have to transition to the modern technology as new platforms get rolled out, they need to be able to keep pace with that, right, so we bring in the trainers
that will help the transition from legacy to modern digital platforms.
And there are lots and lots of new platforms. You mentioned low code, no code that's been a very hot topic the last few years, where you just have a nice graphical user interface and it's typically a drag and drop where you pull together different components and under the covers they handle all the code development, all the code execution.
Right.
Absolutely, Actually there's some exciting things that actually beyond the local no code now with AI, right, AI itself is actually needs to work together with the folks that we're training, because you're no longer just training them the basics of programming, but how to ask the program.
With AI as an assistant.
So it's a little bit of a new game, right, It's almost a game changer where you know, one person needed to learn the very basic coding principles. Now you're doing local no code and reuse, dropping and dropping GUI on top of the thing, and now AI itself. You give them a prompt and it's writing a lot of the code for you. So being able to live in that environment that the expectation is really accelerated outcomes.
Yeah, and of course jen ai is very hot these days. But the problem with jenais you probably know, is that it is probabilistic, so it's not deterministic. I think that's one reason why you see so much emphasis on the copilots, on the helpers, the digital assistance, because the human can then still make a judgment about what to do. You're not just turning the gen AI and letting it do the job. Is that your impression as well?
That absolutely?
Oh absolutely, I think a lot of this hallucinations happened right with some of the It depends on what you use for training the models, So you know, part of the decision making would be when do you point Copilot or others into like external resources where it can be corrupted by a lot of the unvetted information that's being formed to form your answers versus trusted sources for training in house.
Potentially that would allow actually more reliable answers.
And you know, one of the technologies that fascinates me the most, and I'm curious to know if you've heard about this process mining companies like Salonis Software g there's a few of them out there where you track typically the digital data footprints through various information systems to see what's actually happening. To me, that is an incredibly powerful technology for rewriting, reinventing information systems to kind of catapult them into the modern age.
What do you think, Oh?
Absolutely, I think that that saves a lot of time, right. You know, you've done a lot of methods in the past, the versus engineer, and this really helps a lot, especially when you're doing modernization, right, it takes a lot of time to try and trace and ensure that you're able to keep the functions that you want to keep and how to design for the future, and something like this really accelerates that analysis.
Yeah, and open source is a big deal too. Open Source, I think has revolutionized the information technology landscape, certainly on the app development side, I mean all the way down to Linux and the Linux kernel and the work that's being done there, but the entire data stack now has been opening up to open source technology. Are there concerns in federal use cases for open source because the source is open?
What do you think about all that?
I think in the early days there's been a lot of concern But there's like two thoughts on that.
Right.
There's still a lot of folks that kind of want to look at closed systems. But what we're finding out is a lot of folks say, hey, because it's an open system, it's been tested more thoroughly than any closed system that's out there, that they may actually renders them
more secure. You know, I could go both ways on that one, but it really depends on how sensitive the systems you're developing and how you know whether you are exposing vulnerability in an open setting or it's a mature enough platform that's been really thoroughly tested that makes it trustable, like Linux, you know, was in the same boat at some point, and now it's all over the place.
Right now, and now it's the enterprise standard for sure. Absolutely, and we all keep hearing about this it skills shortage, and you know, I don't really know what to make of it all. There are lots of people, I'm sure, who want to learn all those things, and you're filling that gap, right, I mean, you are training and retraining people to learn how to use all the new technologies. And you know, the fun part is that Jenai can
be a big part of that, right. You can load instruction manuals into a Genai solution and then just ask it all kinds of questions. In that environment, it seems to me they're very very very powerful and very effective. They don't hallucinate as much because they're just pointed at a particular document. Is that what you found as well, that Jenny I can be a very powerful copilot in helping to train people to to use new technology.
Well, absolutely, And I think a lot of the younger generation factor growing up with gen Ai access already, right, So we have to adopt our training mechanisms and methods in order to incorporate that in the learning management systems. That we actually have ourselves in house, and so we need to constantly look for new ways of actually training.
As you know, we're trying to train and reskale some of the folks that are more used to the older technologies, and then you have the folks are new younger generation are upcoming that expect that this is the way they want to learn in the future.
So we're trying to have that happy medium.
But the future really is everything's going to be uh gen AI or agentic AI system.
Yeah, and that actually brings up a really good point. I'd be curious to get your thoughts as a trainer, as someone who is working for a company that trains people. We now have arguably five generations in the workforce with very different cultural norms, very different tendencies and more rays.
How do you tackle that.
Do you actually address that programmatically to treat people of a certain age one way and people of a certain age a little bit different just because of their cultural diversity, or how does that actually work?
Yeah, we absolutely need to consider that.
Right, So when we're built out some cowards in the screening process as we are customizing the curriculum, that's part of the consideration. What is the makeup of that cohort. For example, if that's a mix of all five generations, you've got to be able to cater to what's the most effective technique and I just deliver the content the material in a one size fits all manner.
Yeah, that's interesting too, So you know, maybe you could share with our audience a bit how you track those kinds of things, the techniques that you use, which sessions you have people joined to.
Train, and then the efficacy of that down the road.
I mean, I know fed stack is new, but from your smooth Stack experience, for example, how much are you able to track, measure, and then ascertain the efficacy of certain programs to certain demographics and then monitor it and modify that over time.
Yeah.
So that's actually a really good question because that's the reason why we actually came up with our own learning management system to be able to track everything.
Right.
So when you look at a ten to twelve week process and cohort, every week is basically an evaluation where actually the progress of the entire class comes in, right,
So we're trying to develop a cohort. In fact, it's no guarantee that they're actually going to graduate, right, So the efficacy of how we teach that is very important, but also the evaluation factors because we're very selective on the folks that we deploy out there for contracts, so we may start up with a very large number, but by the time if we're finished and only the stream of the crop actually surfaces at the end, so we're
a heavier aligned on metrics. And even after the courses are done, we do checkpoints, right the first thirty days, the first sixty days, what's your feedback of what would you rather us have done. Now that you actually have experience in working this and applying this on your current project, then we use that for the training of the next gohard in order to improve it.
That's very impressive. You developed your own learning management system. If you sometimes you got to roll your own right. You have to figure out what you need done, what functionality you need baked into this system, and if you're a large enough organization, sometimes it makes sense to just build out your own systems.
That's pretty impressive.
So I'm guessing you had some experience with learning management systems and you're like, you know what, we got to really roll up our sleeves and build this out.
Ourselves. How long did that take? Roughly?
Do you know?
Well, it's actually born out of necessity. So when the organization started a smooth stack five six years ago, it was an in person learning. We actually bring our students here, put them in apartments, and we have a whole training facility in house. When COVID hit, everything had to go to virtual and we had to rapidly come up with a way to be able to deliver those same, you know,
quality programs in a virtual manner. And that's what actually prompted us to say, hey, we really need to create our own learning management system in order to deliver what we're able to deliver in an in person manner.
Mm hmm. Yeah.
COVID was quite the forcing function right to use technology term. It really forced us all to take a very hard look at processes, workflows, access to data, access to information systems, and security for goodness sakes. I mean, with everybody working from home now, your threat scape is much larger because you have all these devices everywhere, computers that are outside of your data center, phones that are outside of your
purview at least in the corporate office, et cetera. So that was a real wake up call for you guys that you had to go and reevaluate and redesign how you do these things.
Right, Absolutely, absolutely.
Yeah, that's that's pretty impressive. And let's get into in the next segment.
We'll get a bit deeper into the cybersecurity side, just because that is so important and I happen to know from experience that cybersecurity is a constantly evolving, constantly changing environment and to stay on top of things you need to do. Of course, all the basics, password management, things of this nature. Biometrics of course are really coming into play these days. But you need to be monitoring the network, you need to be monitoring the apps, you need to
be monitoring the behaviors of all these people. And there are hundreds and hundreds of security solutions you can use, some like I suggest, that focus on the network, some focus on the apps, some focus on the users and kind of watching, and some take a more holistic approach. And of course, with machine learning you can track these things more and more assiduously over time. So when we come back from the break, we'll be talking again to
Chris Coligado. He is with fed Stack. This is a new brand that's coming out of the smooth Stack organization that's been around for a while. They do it services, consulting, training, helping people learn how to do the jobs of the future, which are you know, it's the jobs of today, right staying on top of these systems and keeping them safe. Because if the government isn't safe, who is safe? Well, folks, don't touch that deb Right back, you're listening to Inside Analysis.
Welcome back to Inside Analysis. Here's your host, Eric Tabanac.
All right, folks, back here on Inside Analysis talking to Chris Coligato of fed Stack. This is a new brand that's coming out of smooth Stack and Chris, in the last segment, you were talking about how COVID was a forcing function. COVID kind of woke all of us up in lots of different ways and we had to pay close attention to what we're doing. You have to create these immersive experiences for people. So I guess one question
I'll ask you is VR. Are you using virtual reality for any of this training.
We're starting to use VR in certain segments, especially in the enterprise side of things, because some of the clients are actually in the virtual reality environment. So we're experimenting a little bit of that right. But again it goes back to learning learning preferences. So you know, if we are looking at a cohort where they're really receptive to virtual reality, augmented reality type of learning process, you'll surely
explore that. So far, it hasn't been much demand for that type of immersion levels, but something that they were definitely open to.
Yeah.
Well, let's let's take back into the cybersecurity. I mean, how how do you stay on top of all the latest do you interface with companies like Splunk or.
Solar Winds.
Of course, they had their experience with being hacked themselves, which I thought was one of the craziest hacks. I mean, we've seen some really some bad hacks lately. Snowflake was hacked, a lot of customer data was stolen. How do you guys stay on top of the security space to make sure that you are training people for this new generation of technologies?
So yeah, it goes you know, I actually just brought in one of our cybersecurity UH experts is going to be leading that us for the our Tier one consulting arena. But you know, so far we've been basically working our network, whether it's a product based you know, as you mentioned
all all those things that you mentioned earlier. Some of the product vendors but also even some of the training vendors that are out there, they're already delivering these types of methodologies in the defense and Intel spaces.
We keep track of.
That and we create a partnerships on how to actually develop the curriculum together. They usually deliver a lot of these things either in a just urst of content, more of a boot camp style content push, and some of them are very focused just on the certification.
Side of it.
That's when we're actually enriching a lot of the existing programs that are out there through our mirrored environment immersion. That's kind of new. So we're partnering with a lot of the players out there, both product and trainers themselves, in order to deliver a differentiated offering.
Yeah, that's interesting.
And now do you also when you do this training and you follow all the way through, so you're helping folks get jobs at these organizations and your clients.
Is it any number of agencies?
Are there specific agencies that you represent or is there a particular focus or one of the agencies that works with you the most, or tell me about that for a minute.
So we don't currently have any prime contract vehicles, which is one of the key things that I'm looking to explore, hence the expansion of our services to full technology consulting.
Right.
So a lot of our delivery is through our partners, Like our customers are basically your large systems integrators.
They're the mid tiers and.
Then basically they serve they serve the government, and a lot of these contracts, right, so you look at some of the lart and you.
Can name you know, you know anyone out there.
They're serving the federal government, they need to ramp up very quickly, right, And a lot of cases they would say, hey, I need somebody who knows Java, and they'll go in there and test it out, but they don't know the other eighty percent of the stack that's going to be required for that piece.
Right.
That's where we come in and say, well, instead of piece mealing how you bring your talent in, you can get a cohort of ten that could function equivalent to cohort of twenty when you're trying to piecemeal the talent that you're trying to put together. We will put the talent together for you in a very fast method in
a cost effective way. We're actually, i would say we're the greening strategy for a lot of the sis because we are actually creating this new talent pool for very affordable resources because a lot of them are just coming out of college, coming out of former military breaking in. But what they're finding out is the folks that graduate from our programs are equivalent to somebody that they can come out of the street with two to three years
level of experience already that level of equivalency. So it's become a very very strong value proposition for us, both from the cost perspective and then the upfront cost is all the risk is on us. We provide a training these are paid apprenticeships right well, they're on our books, and then when we deploy them to our partners, that's where they actually had their consulting experience and build out. So that's kind of like a win win situation between
us and our partners. At the same time that we're going directly to the government. Our strategy now is the you know, starting to now that we have our brand a little bit of recognitions now and about ten different agencies at this point through our partners, is to start looking at being a small business going directly to the government and actually offering these services directly.
Yeah, that's interesting.
You know.
I was speaking with a gentleman named Alvin fu who is quite a prominent thought leader on LinkedIn.
He's got hundreds of thousands of.
Followers, he's all over the world, and we were talking about artificial intelligence, and he made a very interesting point the other day on this very show in fact, and he said that in the old days of business, if you walked in and said I've got twenty years or
twenty years of experience, that was a real benefits. These days, it's not as much because the systems are so different, the environment is so different, and you almost have to unlearn old ways of doing things to appreciate the new ways of doing things.
Do you do you agree with that?
Do you feel like, yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Actually, that was a really interesting conversation between me and our CTEO here because I said, hey, you know, I came in with thirty years of experience in industry, and it was like, oh, you know, yeah, me, it's too I have, you know, from something similar. But don't think about it as an advantage necessarily, because some cases you do have to unlearn some of these things when you start looking
at some of the technologies available. What we call the digital native folks that are coming up a high school college, they already immersing these things and they can pick up things very quickly, multiple stacks before somebody. It's actually sometimes harder to teach somebody who's you know, got the ten years experience to adopt and learn the new technology because they're so biased and some of the they've been thinking of,
you know, old system, old methodologies. They have to unlearn some of that in order to accelerate the learning on the new technologies.
Right.
You know, we had a guy in the show a while ago, Chris Gladwin. He is the CEO of a company called Ocians, and they do hyper scale data warehousing where they can literally ingest trillions of records. We're talking just gobsmacking amounts of data. And he mused that you can't be looking at log files like individual log files anymore. You have to be scanning and using machine learning to send the patterns.
In the log files.
And this is an example of how much things have changed. You can't I mean, it's kind of like, I mean, this is maybe not the best analogy, but in auto repair, it used to really have to know what this was and what that was.
These days, they stick that.
Little thing in there and they get their reading in the computer, and it's a whole different ballgame for how you address problems, how you understand the problem space, what you.
Do to solve it. So all these.
Things, you know, some of the folks are you kind of have to unlearn some of what they've learned in order to really embrace this new age.
Right absolutely.
I mean you know, so we're teaching how to do modern modern development.
Right.
Uh, if you start trying to teach folks that are coming from the old school, they're doing manual test development, doing all the stuff.
A lot of that is automated.
Nowadays, right, And how do you package and deploy to the cloud very different when you're trying to deploy an on premise situation where most people actually kind of live most of their careers in and you have to actually really teach them that advancement is. And they actually get shocked when you see how easy it is that these
things are automated. Instead of testing for weeks, these things are checked in multiple multiple times a day, tested the whole harness multiple times a day and it's ready to deploy tomorrow, right yeah.
And that's the kind of speed that you need these days because if you think about all the tools that we have at our disposal, well, guess what, the bad guys have all those tools at their disposal as well. And you know, we've seen some really, really bad hacks. I always point to the Colonial pipeline hack, which you know, the media said was not state sponsored. I don't really believe that. I don't expect you to comment on it.
But you know, when when an organization brings down the distribute distribution of gas for the Eastern seaboard, I mean that's a real serious problem, right. That's not like the you know, the target breach or something where customer data is still and that's bad too, But goodness gracious, when something is important as fuel is deprived of huge areas of the country, that's what you really have to start focusing.
And that's I think there's a wake up call to a lot of people in the security space to realize that these threats are very real. They are persistent what do they call them APT advanced persistent threats?
Right, yep, yeah, and you know. I mean there's a lot of things that are continue to merch. I guess it's cat and mouse, right. Vendor partners are constantly trying to be ahead of it, and all the perpetrators are of course trying to one up the next solution. But a lot I think the weakest link in all of that is still around the people.
Right.
So when you talk about inside our threat, unless you have a holistic approach to really patch all the different layers of security, you're always going to be vulnerable. It can't just be totally reliant just on advanced technology, but you have to get your people trained and that they're not creating the vulnerabilities themselves right.
Well, and you know, I get really excited about some of the newer technologies and you think about the capacity we have now to scan entire networks to map them out, where are the apps, whereas the data going, who's accessing the data? And there are just huge areas that you can close off. I mean, we didn't used to have the capacity to really understand who's using one and when at some sort of significant scale, but now we have that.
And there's some basic things like users who haven't logged in in the past six months shut them down.
They're probably gone, right this see.
That should be automated, right, right, right, right, right exactly. It actually does that.
Yeah.
Well, And that's the other side of the equation too, right, is that it Historically you could have a policy, there was a bunch of words that someone had to manually update and enforce.
You don't have to do that anymore.
You can have policies that are extant and affect information systems dynamically. Now you still have a manual override switch at some point say okay, the machine did this, but I wanted to do that. But still, when you automate that, you solve probably eighty percent of your challenges out of the box, right, yeah, And.
You're starting to get into a lot of the self healing platforms now, right, So you don't have to really have the intervention getting the right policies and business shows
out there and pretty much you know, locked and loaded. Right, it just does that, and you know, you just have to worry about some of the notifications and with a lot of the data that comes in, you can control how much or how little you know that you can actually then prioritize where you can actually have the human loop to intervene as necessary.
Yeah, right, well, and just in terms of data usage and data storage, for example, to be able to isolate cold data, understand nobody's using this data, you know, do we really need it? And I mean this is a full time job for folks, even with the new technologies, to be able to scan these environments. Data governance, right, I mean, I'm guessing you've probably seen this too. Data governance. We talked about it ten years ago. You couldn't really do it. Five years ago we talked about it. We're
starting to be able to do it now. You can really do very fine grained data governance in all kinds of environments, right.
Oh, absolutely, And you know it's taken from the policy or the written documents and actually scripting and actually automating that, right, so it's actually executable. In the past, it's about, hey, here's the policy, somebody has to interpret it. Then you have to kind of write the sop to and hope that somebody will actually react and perform it, right.
Right, that's the thing you used actually this hope, you know, and pray that someone was actually reading it and then adhering to it. These days, it is a completely different environment. And you know, I'll just throw another fun concept at you. I was at the out Systems conference in Amsterdam last November and they just came out their a local platform.
They just came out with Mentor is their new copilot, And you could actually load a requirements document into this thing and it will generate the app for you and then you just start fine tuning it. That's an example of how much things have changed, right that you can just because the GENAI can read pars, understand the text and you know what they did that blew my mind is the agent actually noticed a missing option and filled
it in automatically. Now that's when you're really getting somewhere and using the machines to the greatest of their strengths.
Right.
Absolutely, it's a balance, right, So we always consider that in our training, right because before we you know, in the traditional sense of how you know, you do applications development, you go through the different methodologies and teach them everything.
Right now they have to really learn how to code tests with AI or agents at their disposal, right, and you can have multiple agents that they can be working on, so almost as a programmer, you're not just an individual now, right, you actually have to learn almost to manage these agents. And then the sort of like the traffic cop or referee as a final arbiter says, Okay, this is a fine this is the final code.
It's what it's supposed to be. But it's not like you're doing it from scratch right now.
This is what Jensen Hang was talking about just the other day, saying that I D departments will be more like HR departments for AI agents in the future.
Ye, that's a good and how which.
Is pretty funny, right You're like, wow, that's interesting. I do think there's a good ways to go still in being able to effectively harness such agents, shepherd them, manage them, catalog what they're doing, be able to really understand what they're allowed to do. Because you've turned something fully autonomous. You never know what's going to happen out there, but it is moving very very quickly. And you were seeing this agentic focus from big companies like of course Salesforce
is doing that. Lots of small companies too. Well, folks, don't touch the l be right back where you're listening to Inside Analysis expect.
Welcome back to Inside Analysis. Here's your host, Eric Tabanaugh.
Show.
All right, folks back here on Inside Analysis, a fascinating show with Chris Coligato. He is with fed Stack. This is a new brand spine out of the smooth Stack operation. They train folks to work for the big service integrators that work for our US government and get things done. And I guess one question I'd ask you is, what was the impetus to launch fed stack as a separate entity or as a separate brand.
What happened that.
That led you guys to believe, Hey, we need to do something different here, we need to have a new focus.
Yeah.
So when we look at, you know, the origins of smooth Stack when it started about five sixty five, six years ago, the initial focus was on the enterprise side, right, commercial companies and so on.
And when we started looking at.
Marketing some of these things into the federal market, it's almost like by accident that we found out that there's an actual, real need.
And gap.
For actual partnering with systems integrators. They become basically became our initial targets because they're the ones that are actually trying to fulfill a lot of the talent requirements for the federal government and it's a very slow process, each one competing with each other with the same pool of resources. And it became apparent to us because one of our founders here actually had a previous company that was also doing a lot of consulting and they had to compete
for the same pool of resources. And when they discovered that, hey, if we really want the quality of people that we want in order to service our main clients, we actually have to come up with our own way of actually
training them up. And so it was born out of that experience as a separate company where they developed this that they say, you know what, we can actually offer this to other partners now, And that's kind of how we was born, right, It's like, all right, we kind of figure out what the secret sauce was, we do it for ourselves, we prove that we can do it better than anybody else, and basically started really adding logos
of new companies and then it started from there. But it became very apparent that what we're doing, it's a very different way of doing business, at least from a growth perspective on how you go after work in the enterprise or commercial sector versus a very highly regulated environment. For instance, you know, in order to deploy somebody to a commercial environment, it's pretty easy. They don't have a lot of background investigations, security clearances, and things like that.
We have to ensure that when somebody graduates from a class,
they're actually ready and able to actually work, right. So that's part of an additional offering that we have with our partners and directly to the government is while people are training on our dime, they're already going through the secret or top secret interim clearance processes, so that when we say they're ready to report after twelve weeks, they really can't actually execute, rather than waiting for months and months even you know, to be vetted in.
Right.
So we felt that, you know, knowledge of how you do business in the federal government is different then the way we actually do transactions and the commercial sector. And it also became apparent that, hey, we also want to be in the prime game at some point.
Right.
So at this point, we're serving a lot of the partners that we have on board our tier two and training Tier three services, and we wanted to actually be in control of our own destiny, and we wanted to basically deliver solutions themselves, right, and also continue the career path for the folks that we've actually have been training
up so far. A number of that is being converted to our partners as their employees in the future as we start to expand our offerings and actually doing a consulting, we're actually creating a career path for them to continue should they decide not to move forward with existing projects
they're deployed to. We're creating an opportunity for them to actually continue their employment with Fedstack and serving and full consulting after they've gotten some of the experience of the entry level professional services, they can actually get a career path all the way through solutions, architects, senior architects and so on.
As they have they pursue an ax step with the career.
Yeah, well that's great, and I mean I know from experience, and I'm sure you've seen this as well, that when someone really knows what to do in a situation involving industrial enterprise technology, they can save you time money. I mean we're talking weeks, months, millions of dollars, even billions of dollars if they really know what they're doing, and it's difficult for people to ascertain that.
I mean, if you don't know, it's.
Like we always joke about in the old days, the car repairman was like a doctor who told you was wrong, how much it would take to fix and everything. It's like, well, if you're on the outside, how can you challenge it? I mean, the business leaders and the government leaders need to know some of this stuff to be able to
challenge things and understand. That's why it's so important to get a good trusted advisor to help you on the these projects, right, because they can make all the difference in the world.
What do you think, Yeah, absolutely so, I think that's a very good point because another piece that kind of differentiates us is we're not just doing technical training, right. So part of actually our curriculum is to do well rounded consultants at the end of the process, right, So we teach them how to communicate in a target environment for let's say, for a particular project within an agency. We also teach them how to operate with that agency,
give them lessons on the mission itself. And that's a big different difference between the commercial and the federal side is it has to be mission aligned, right, So it's not just about the technology that you're doing you need to understand what the mission you're supporting. And that combination of mission knowledge coming from the experts and the clients themselves, immersed with the technology know how, that's a really great combination that we're trying to push forward.
Yeah, and it's the next channel.
I mean, we talk about the ten X developer, for example, which refers to someone who really either knows the full stack or knows enough that they don't waste time and they can really produce quickly. And these days that's going to rely heavily on using copilots, on being open minded about what these systems can tell us, understanding that a
copilot will get you almost all the way there. I think eighty percent is a good rule of thumb, the Preado principles everywhere in life, right, they can get you eighty percent of the way there, and then you have to do the fine tuning to kind of finish that all out. But to not embrace those technologies is really a non start of these days.
What do you think, Oh, yeah, you got to be left behind, right, because everybody's doing that in all aspects in the federal business, for example, not just from the technology folks that we're training but even our business development right as we're responding to RFIs and rps, you better believe it that you need AI and.
Just being able to shift true amountains of data.
Right just to qualify you know what you're going to be right and then get a starter, setup a draft at least to meet some of the compliance requirements. And you know, when you look at using a co pilot, let's say pointed to a public training database or LLM, you need to make sure that you're augmenting it with your private training data set that's unique to your organization.
Otherwise everybody is pulling from the same data, the same hallucinations, And you look at some of the folks that are actually on the client side and receiving end, it's like, well, you know what, you're just using copilot on this one. Everybody else does you submit exactly the same content can get really funny. So I think that's how we organizations
will kind of move this forward. I'd say you're right about eighty percent of it is just to be an equal footing with your competitors that everybody else is using it. Where you have to make the differentiator is what is your private training data that allows you then to actually put forward what's really unique about your organization.
Yeah, no doubt about it.
I mean there and there are so many different realms to address, I guess legacy systems, and that's that's got to be a concern for government agencies and for the the sis that you work with is how do we migrate away from some of these systems. You know, some of these environments are using old operating systems that are not even maintained anymore.
That in and of itself is a huge space to address, right.
Yes, a lot of these modernizations have been going on for decades, right, They've been involved in some of the agencies that they started it thirty years ago, right and still still ongoing. And some of these systems already you know, back to the fifties and sixties, so when they were
initially built. I think the next challenge, though, I think everybody is trying to modernize, moving from the old coldbal you know, assembly languages into the even away from the main frames into into some of the newer technologies.
Right.
But I think the next challenge would.
Be how about the workforce program managers, technical managers of the old system once it's migrated, right, you then need to equip them on how to manage in the new technology, right. So it's actually an interesting thing. That's why we actually created our Tier three services, our partner training both straight to the government is being able to say, how do we help you in your transition. You're all in, everybody's involved,
our partners sis the government. They just move from the legacy system and they just upgrade it to the new sets of technologies. Well, they know the domain knowledge, right and the business policies and the old one, they don't know how to translate and operate in the new environment. So in fact, helping folks that preserve that old knowledge because that's important in order or to operate in a new environment. But they need to learn how to operate
in the new environment. So that's really how our Tier three offering really originated, is for that demand that a lot of folks are in modernization. Then they're figuring out, oh my god, I have a lot of talent here I need to preserve, but they're not used to the new technology. So there needs to be a transition, right, preserving that old knowledge and being able to operate in the future.
Absolutely well, Folks podcast bonus segment coming up next will be right back all right, folks, time for the podcast bonus segment here on Inside Analysis with Chris Coldegato of fed Stack and Chris, lots of people out there are looking for jobs. You know, we're in a very strange
time right now. You're going to see lots of layoffs at big companies as companies really try to reorganize and understand how to work in this new world because with all these copilots, while let's face it, people who have jobs are going to have to do slightly different jobs or even significantly different jobs and really stay abreast of
what's happening out there. So what's your advice to folks to help them understand maybe which direction they should go they want to work with you, which path should they follow? How do you know what you're going to enjoy doing? What's your advice to people looking for work right now?
So, you know, I think it's important to know kind of what level you're at at this point. Right we specialize on a lot of the folks that are actually in the entry level folks, right so we're creating that launching that career path for folks that are exiting college or just trying to break in the same thing with
the former military. If you're in a situation where you are experience and you're experiencing a layoff, right, it could be a little bit of a shock when you try to enter the market and you're used to working in the legacy environment and now you're being asked to operate an environment you've never been exposed to. And so I think that's critically important that you gain the proper skills
that's marketable in the current environment. We talk a lot about AI and basically augment and thing what you may you may be an experienced developer in the past, but a lot of expectation is that you have to learn how to program together with your assistance or your AI assistance,
and that's a brand new gain. So in order for you to not only differentiate yourself, but just to keep up right, because your competition is actually probably not necessarily the UH, the tenured resources, but even the upcoming UH you know, younger generation who's actually been brought up in this type of technology. Right, So it's it's very very important to understand the landscape, who your competitors are, and then be able to highlight what your value proposition is.
Right, Yeah, you know, And one final question I'll throw at you, what which part of the market do you think is most underserved? Is there an area like AI, cybersecurity andalytics, data infrastructure? Are there any areas that seem to be bigger than others in terms of opportunities that you're seeing right now?
AI is exploding, so that's very important.
Data centers are popping up, which basically coming with AI.
It's chicken our eggscenario there one is kind.
Of feeding each other, right with the advent of FAI, more computing power, more data center is going to be up, So technicians on the data center area is actually a very strong growth area to focus on, which also can gain you exposed to some of the AI applications development.
Maybe a good entry.
Way is to start getting exposed to the infrastructure that's going to be housing a lot of this AI and computing power. So I think those two and of course CyberSecure is always a requirement, So regardless of what you're heading, you need to make sure that you're well rounded. Any kind of solutions you're developing is well grounded in security.
Yeah, that's really good advice and I always suggest to folks and I'm guessing your degree, focus on something you really enjoy. If you are naturally curious about hardware, go down the hardware road. If you're naturally curious about app development, focus on app development. I mean that example I gave about these new machines, these new systems being able to load a requirements document into a gen AI oriented engine and have it build an app for you.
I mean, that's just crazy. That is so much different than the way it used to be.
And whenever you see these huge advances in productivity, you got to jump on board quick right, Final thoughts from you.
Chris, absolutely.
I mean this is a very fast changing environment and so you're going to be left behind very quickly unless you keep up. So you may be busy doing kind of what your day job is, but you need to kind of do your homework and really continue to learn. Continuous learning is what's going to give you keep your value long term.
That's great, that's great advice.
Well, look these folks up online, Chris Coligato co L I G A d O.
It's fed Stack.
Congratulations on doing some good work keeping our country safe, prosperous. That's what we want to see here, folks. Send an email I want to be on the show. Info at inside analysis dot com. We'll talk to you next time. You've been listening to Inside Analysis and.
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Summertime and the living is easy. Fish are jumping and wait a minute, what the hell is this? A summer camp for kids? But with a disturbing corporate twist. Some outlets of Chick fil A, the fast food chicken chain, for promoting a summer camp for children as young as five can learn quote, how to be a Chick fil
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on these life lessons. The kiddos do get compensated, sort of with their very own Chick fil A name tag and a T shirt. Okay, this is not the Dickensien dystopia of nineteenth century England, but is that our modern standard. There's nothing wrong with young kids working, but five year olds and as was the case in the preteen tasks I had in my father's small business and on my Aunt EULA's farm, the objective ought not be in doctrination
into the corporate culture of low wage French. Rather, I was learning to help the family and how to contribute to the larger community. My reward was not merely a token stipend, but a recognition that I belonged, that I had a role and was valued as part of that community. People didn't need a corporate name tag to know who I was. This is Jim high Tower saying there's so much more that an eleven billion dollar nationwide giant like check fil a could do for the communities that provided profits.
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NVC News Radio. I'm Chris Gragio. President Trump is ordering immediate tariffs and travel ban on Columbia after it denied entry to a pair of US military deportation flights. The flights involved two SEE seventeen aircraft, which were each caring about eighty Colombian migrants from California. In response, Trump announced on truth Social that he ordered decisive retaliatory measures, including a twenty five percent tariff on all Colombian imports. He added,
these measures are just the beginning. Trump said Colombia's action violated its legal obligation to accept the return of criminals they forced into the United States. Senator Lindsey Graham says he believes it was a mistake for President Trump to pardon anybody convicted of violent crimes. During the January sixth ride at the Capitol, the South Carolina Republican told CNN State of the Union that he's a firm backer of the president, but he doesn't think it's acceptable to pardon
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The federal Inspectors General are independent government figures charged with rooting out fraud, waste, and violations within their own agencies. White House officials confirm over a dozen of them were fired Friday night because they don't align with the new Trump administration, calling the move a very common thing to do.
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