Government Technology News: Funding, Contracting and Defense with Ross Wilkers

Carolyn:

Yes. Well, let me give our audience an introduction to who we've got in the hot seat today. So today, we have reporter Ross Wilker, who's senior staff reporter for Washington Technology, and he focuses on the business of government contracting, plus the companies and trends that shape the market. Plus, he's a fellow podcaster, Mark. Today, we're going to grill him on government contracting, and specifically the impacts of the FY23 Defense Funding Bill, which includes 11.2 billion for cybersecurity, Alliant 3, and the government talent landscape. So officially, welcome, Ross. Thank you so much for joining us.

Ross:

Great to be here. Happy to follow your lead. You mentioned a fellow podcaster, right? So usually, I'm in your role of asking the questions, and now it's my turn to be the one answering them. So it'll be a good exercise for me in this role reversal.

Mark:

So Ross, you have 10 minutes to wrap up in a pretty bow government contracting.

Carolyn:

That's right. Well, I want to talk about the FY23 Defense Funding Bill, and specifically, like I said, the 11.2 billion for cybersecurity, which by the way, Mark and I heard rumors that it was double that for cybersecurity, but that includes cybersecurity, cyberspace operations, and cyber research and development. So what opportunities and challenges does this present to the government contracting community?

Ross:

So to set the context for how it affects industry, it's not a short-term thing. It's essentially, whenever you see these funding bills sign in the law out of Congress, and it doesn't matter whether it's the cyber bill that we're talking about here around 11-12 billion or even the infrastructure bill last year, it's for companies, it's like a hurry up and wait ... It's good news, but essentially, the way to think about the money here is it's like it's sitting in an escrow account waiting to be used and how it's to be decided upon and how they're going to apply it.

So when that turns into actual procurement and acquisition activity, that's the thing to watch because that's not what Congress is telling them to do. They're telling them how much you have and what it's going to be used for, but there's an extra bit of process and decision making that comes out of that, and that's what companies are going to be watching for and positioning.

Mark:

There's continuing resolution impact, all that kind of stuff, meaning, is this stuff get kicked down the road because we may not have a budget in place for half a year or something like that? Does it-

Ross:

Delays it, right? It basically moves the finish line to the right. So woohoo, you got a funding package for cyber and advanced research and development, but when it's a matter of when agencies see that, right? So if there's a six month continuing resolution, which has been the norm and it's almost embedded into the public sector ecosystem that you're going to work under these stop gap funding measures every fiscal year. They wouldn't start to see it in their account until early spring of next calendar year, and that's halfway through the government fiscal year.

Mark:

Yeah, and then you got a mad rush to try to spend money. I've heard people say, I've heard government folks say in this arena, "How will you ever spend this money?"

Carolyn:

Is there-

Ross:

They have to find a place to put it because the accountants, and not official accountants, but unofficially, people that watch this, if they look at money agencies have, they sit on, they don't need it, they go, "Hmm, you're not getting it next time, next fiscal year," and it becomes-

Carolyn:

Yeah, use it or lose it.

Ross:

Right. Use it or lose it.

Carolyn:

Is there a contract vehicle that gets set up and they send out RFPs and there's a prime and all of that? I mean, how do they access this money?

Ross:

So just to set the context for my role as a business reporter, I'm not on Capitol Hill and I cover a little bit about procurement acquisition as it pertains to industry, but I can certainly speak to the direction of how companies look at it and where it's going. So they get the money, they understand what it's used for, and what we're talking about is a very different funding approach than, say, defense weapon systems, okay?

So if the Air Force gets allotted a certain amount of money to buy a certain amount of fighter jet, that's what it's going to be used for because Congress has the power of the per strings, right? When I read this, the details on this particular cyber and research package when I was heading in, it does strike me, it continues to, as somebody who covers essentially software for a living, things with ones and zeros. It's very general when I read this language.

It just says, "Cyber."

"What for?"

"Cyber."

"Oh, okay."

So it's leaving a lot of that decision power on what exactly they need in cyber to agency directors and then it goes down into the different operations divisions inside agencies and then procurement and contracting officers make their decisions based on that.

Mark:

It seems like it's needed. The money is needed in this area, but it's go forth and conquer as you see fit. It feel that way, anyway, or maybe there are agencies like CISA that drive overarching-

Carolyn:

Strategies?

Mark:

... strategies and construct of these things like zero trust and say, "Look, this is the framework you want to work in." I don't know.

Ross:

Yeah. I mean, you're starting to see, starting is probably the not the right word. When it comes to individual procurements and even at a policy level overall of procurement and acquisition, there's a lot of attention and focus on cybersecurity and what's expected out of industry. It's not a nice to have. It's not, "Okay. Here's what you can offer us and let's separate the cybersecurity and what you do outside of that," right? Cyber's being embedded into a lot of this, which one could argue it should have been that way, anyway, if we look at the way the digital world is. It's not nearly a safe place, speaking as somebody who's suffered a minor financial cost over being breached a couple times. You start to get the picture there.

Mark:

Yeah. So Ross, does money like this from legislation flow into existing programs that already are in existence out there and start. So I think of, "Okay. Well, the large FSIS are the organizations that typically are priming or own the contracts on some of these large programs." So they're probably looking to take money like that into move into programs to help agencies and things like that as opposed to new stuff coming out or is it we're going to see a combination of that type of thing?

Ross:

It's a combination of it, usually. My intuition, hunch, if you call it that, and again, I'm not basing this on reporting that I've done. This is just putting my old research and analyst hat on that I wore before I transitioned back into the world of journalism. Well, let me ask you all this. What is the new approach to cybersecurity or is it just a matter of now we're actually serious about it and good cybersecurity is not free industry?

Carolyn:

Honestly-

Ross:

Bad cyber security definitely is free and the ability to do damage in the digital world is, certainly, it's got a huge financial burden.

Mark:

Do you want us to answer that as representatives of a software company or as just general industry participants in this arena? Because I got two different answers.

Ross:

You kick the hat-

Carolyn:

Well, when I read your article, Ross, it feels like the government, the strategy is let's just throw some more money at it. That's what it feels like. That's the strategy, money.

Ross:

So having more money doesn't make you necessarily smarter. So I am struggling to understand why on a continuous cycle, new programs and new iterations are constantly coming up and there doesn't seem to me to be a finish line on the ones that already started. So I couldn't tell you whether or not some of these programs at an individual level are working. It's like an incomplete in a college course that we all probably had to take and drop once in a while, right? I couldn't tell you how I did because I stopped six weeks in and started a new one.

Mark:

I think that throwing money, it does feel like throwing money at the problem, but we do need to throw money at the problem. So maybe-

Carolyn:

We need money.

Mark:

Maybe there's been this feeling like we don't have enough people, we don't have enough expertise, we don't have enough of whatever to do what we need to do in these existing programs. So throwing money at it, how that flows out, assuming that the money's going to flow on these programs, gives people the ability to hire or whatever.

Ross:

So whether more money will fix the issues and government, not just cyber, but just government technology in general, whether more money fixes the problem or not is probably a lot. It's line ball, a live discussion on whether that works or not because technology can also be a way for organizations to cut costs, right? So it's one or the other. IT, a lot of commercial market enterprises, they use IT as a lever to ring costs out and gain efficiency. So any down payment they make, you start to see the curve of spending go down as everybody buys technology on the commercial curb, right?

You won't find anybody in the public sector ecosystem, I don't care if it's government contractors or it's government agencies or even let's say the highly regulated industries, that they wear both hats where government is customer and regulator. There doesn't seem to be any disagreement among everybody that there needs to be more talent and people coming into it, and particularly those that may not have been exposed to the public sector ecosystem before. Some of the statistics that I've written about and covered that I think we're going to maybe touch on this later-

Carolyn:

Well, let's just talk about it right now. I mean, this is something you covered a lot, Ross, and we've seen, obviously, the talent gap, and especially in cybersecurity. We've been feeling it for years now. So I mean, talk about this gap, this challenge, and is there a strategy to fix it?

Ross:

Well, there definitely needs to be a circuit breaker soon. The circuit breaker that I hear people suggest, but how it actually manifests itself I don't know, is that government agencies and their contractors often find themselves competing for the same talent, and not just tech talent, but you take something like contract specialists, for instance. The government needs those people too, and especially when you consider that close to 7% of the federal government's acquisition workforce is under 30 years of age.

Mark:

Yeah. There's a big turnover there as well, where there's been a lot of experience that's gone out the door, right?

Ross:

Yeah, no. A lot of those people, they either retired during the pandemic or they just decided, "I've had enough of this, I want to do something else in the civil service." So that's not just a great resignation thing, that's just a great realignment, I think is the word that people often have used, where it's, "I'm tired of this. I want to do something else," or "You know what? I'm tired of this. I'm just going to go fishing in a lake the rest of my life and happy retirement."

Mark:

I've heard a few people say that.

Ross:

I wish I could say that, but I'm lost up here.

Carolyn:

I know. So you said you've heard they're buying for the same talent. Are there ideas of how to attract more talent, how to align the talent better? What's your feelings on that?

Ross:

One of the circuit breakers that, and just to contextualize my job as a journalist clearly in this setting and others, you've seen that I give a little bit of a dose of analysis and opinion, but I try not to be too much of, "You should do this and you should do that." I try to present things to think about and contextualize it to put that to the agenda.

One of the circuit breakers that I think everybody involved has to get around is this idea that most of everything has to happen in the national capital region, especially when you consider that depending on how you do the math of how much government contracting contributes to the US economy, but let's just use federal spending as a data point, and then you can draw a conclusion of how big this vertical is. It's almost a third of US gross domestic product. When you adjust it for things like inflation and look at it more from a long-term perspective, this tells you that it's a national economy and it's not just-

Mark:

You mean IT in general or what?

Ross:

Federal spending of which IT is part of that because government contractors don't just do IT, right? I don't cover these specifically, but there's construction, there's the defense weapon system, there's all sorts of stuff, but everybody uses IT even though they're not IT contractors, but for the size of the vertical that it is, and I would argue that it's arguably bigger than some of the other ones. If it's a national industry, it needs to be one. It actually needs to act like one.

So this idea that everything has to be along the I95 corridor, which is I would think it's 100% developed, but for some reason, we keep finding new places to build data centers in Fairfax and Loudon County is that they're going to have to look at other geographic regions. There are some efforts to make that happen, but the talent has to come from somewhere. We're in a region that essentially has zero unemployment. So the math, it's just stripping away the emotion at that cause.

Mark:

You're 100% right. This is a national problem.

Carolyn:

Yeah, but I-

Mark:

It seems like a generational problem as well. It almost seems like it's going to take a generation for us to be able to answer the mail because if you think, "Okay. It needs to be in investment and collaboration with academia, universities," whatever, but it doesn't have to be university. It can be trade schools, tech schools. When airmen go into the Air Force, young airmen, they train a whole generation of these people to learn these tech skills in their school houses and things like that.

Ross:

I do think mission and purpose is something that can be sold to future talent. I can't tell anybody they're wrong when they say that's why you should join the public sector ecosystem. That's true of any job, right? That's one of the takeaways of this great ... I don't like the word great resignation because we all have to be doing something. We all just can't be fishing on a boat like I joked about earlier, but purpose and meaning and work is something that's no longer like, "Well, I can have it, but if I'm doing this job without a career for advancement, some of us are content with that." That's true of some people, but I don't believe that's true of the majority either.

So the leaders in this ecosystem, they can definitely sell purpose and meaning as a reason to become part of it, but what a lot of organizations, and I don't care if this is commercial or government, people want to see not just that their job matters, but they want to see room for advancement and development or they're going to go or they're essentially going to go somewhere else. The days where people just got a job at an employer and stayed there for four years, those have been gone for a while.

Carolyn:

Yeah. Well, let's shift gears a little bit. Can you talk to us about Alliant 3? I'm not going to lie, I hadn't heard of Alliant 3 before, so I'm just going to show my ignorance here. So I want you to start with explain what Alliant 3 is and why it's such a big deal.

Ross:

So the general services administration, which the mission that they are most known for in government is they're the government's real estate agent and essentially their landlord, right? So they are responsible for the real estate portfolio of essentially every agency. They also run a lot of procurement and acquisition activity on behalf of agencies that don't want to run that themselves or they don't feel like they have the expertise in house to run that. So they basically say, "Okay. GSA, can you do this on our behalf?"

I hope that sets the overall context for the Alliant program, and it's a contract program essentially for IT services and solutions and it's available to any agency. Billions of dollars are obligated and spent against it every year when agencies place orders against it. So it's a vehicle that companies try to get on as almost like it's an overused term, but we'll go with it. It's a hunting license for companies to essentially compete again to provide IT services to other federal agencies. GSA isn't quite ready to talk about this third iteration that's coming up of the Alliant vehicle, but later on this year, we'll see their initial draft plans for how they plan to go about it. So I hope that helps.

Carolyn:

Is the Alliant vehicle the GSA schedule like just getting on the GSA list? Different. Okay,

Ross:

GSA schedule is for very commoditized services. So if you want to buy pencils, pens, IT commodities, GSA schedule is for that. What Alliant is about is these big, big, big IT jobs that agencies need to get done.

Mark:

So what are the differences between the previous versions in this one? Just refreshing direction?

Ross:

So federal law requires that they recompete these contracts, right? So it's not a case of GSA on the companies, "We don't like what you're doing, so we're going to go out and essentially rebid it," right? The law says that they have to hold a new competition at every, we'll just call it every seven to 10 years because I think the current one was awarded about five years ago, and so I'm ballparking that that has about a few years left of runway to it, but because it has a few years left of runway and considering the complexity of the IT services that agencies want to order through this vehicle, GSA has got to start the work now, essentially, on planning. They can't procrastinate on this forever.

That's true of all government agencies. I don't care if it's a defense weapons platform or anything. These things have to be on a certain schedule. You can't just get it done in a month given the size, scale, and complexity of it.

Mark:

There's be certain amount of dollar value associated with this and there'll be large and small and set aside parts for different companies and organizations to compete.

Ross:

So Alliant is open to companies of all shapes and sizes. Now, GSA is going through its cycle for this other procurement called Polaris, which originally, when they were competing this current second iteration of Alliance, the full and open one predominantly of large businesses, GSA awarded it, got through protests and whatnot. The small business sibling vehicle for Alliant 2, they awarded it, it got protested and for reasons that are too complicated and too lengthy to get into for this program. The GSA decided to essentially redo it into this other procurement called Polaris, which is, as I tried to describe earlier, it's a sibling vehicle, essentially, to the Alliant program, but it's for the small business community only. So that's the set aside equivalent, and GSA is going through that process as we are recording this.

Mark:

Hey, can I switch gears here for a second? You got me thinking about some things that I know and I've seen over the past few years, but there's been a lot of movement, M&A movement with large organizations out there like the FSIS and things like that, even in other industries related to this as well. Can you talk a little bit and provide us some insight as to some of the things that you're seeing around this?

Ross:

So it's funny. When I was studying, it's what I've said and written, and I made a joke about this before we turned on the recording, right? It's very easy for a business reporter to forget what he said and written in the past, which is dangerous because there's a digital record of it. So if I make a mistake or I get a take that's completely wrong, someone will message me later and go, "What was this idiot saying five years ago? Didn't pan out."

So I've been covering this as a researcher and then turned journalist for close to 10 years. I've seen three companies, and I'm just doing this off the top of my head. I've seen three IT and services-oriented companies list themselves on the public market, become publicly traded companies, and all of them have gotten acquired since then. It's happened three times. Just when I get used to adding this company on my watch list and then they just disappear in a few years, and that shows you how ... One could argue with their conspiracy theory add on that they listed publicly with the idea that they advertise themselves and get sold later.

Not to name names, but I'm pretty confident that's happened once, but that should illustrate how fast a lot of these companies at least feel like they have to change themselves and not just through large scale M&A, but you can also look back at some of these companies and see maybe the small acquisitions that they've done earlier on, which sometimes those are the ones that you have to look back on more so than the headline grabbers, although we love a multi-billion dollar acquisition. It gives us funny to write and talk about over the next few days.

The smaller ones, I would caution everybody not to overlook those because when you chart company's history, you can look at those that, maybe in terms of size, they don't look all that significant, but you go, "Okay. They did this, they did this, they did this, and this is what they turned into." You can see how companies make little marginal reinventions throughout their history, right? I mean, it's just like the pop music career of Madonna. She's done these little reinventions here and there and she's still relevant.

Mark:

That's an interesting analogy.

Carolyn:

Yeah. So it sounds like-

Ross:

I got to pick something that's outside of the real world, and look, she's done it. So the Madonna playbook seems to work in GovCon.

Carolyn:

So the mergers and acquisitions are happening often and that's not going to change. It sounds like it's necessary for the companies to even stay relevant.

Ross:

This is a very, very difficult corner of the economy to maintain organic growth and just on your own because even though there are no official statistics on this, but it's very easy to become entrenched in an agency or in a particular division of that agency as an incumbent, and particularly in the defense and national security community where a lot of these founders and entrepreneurs of small businesses, they're able because of their knowledge and relationship to, essentially, rank fence, the customer, right?

Even when you look at the federal systems integration community like the tier one, Blue Chip, it may look like they're actually in every corner of the market and they just dominate it, but if you do the math and you use, essentially, their own numbers against them because, well, to set the context for that, what a lot of publicly traded companies do, because they have to talk about their business, is they'll size up what they call their addressable market, right? So that's an area of the federal budget that they feel like they can work in.

Even for the large ones, if you use their own numbers against them and look at their addressable market, some of them are only in about two to three percent of it revenue-wise. So in the grand scheme of government contracting, even the largest of the largest, the idea that they have this, that one on its own has overwhelming market dominance and power. It's not necessarily true. Now, when you put the tier ones together in a big blob, then certainly, you can see the percentage of the market that they dominate in. So I hope that paints a good picture for you.

Carolyn:

Yeah, yeah, it does. So before we run out of time, time's always beating us on this show, I want to talk about your podcast, so Project 38. Tell our listeners a little bit about your podcast, where the name came from, what kind of guests you interview.

Ross:

Yeah. So stay tuned on Project 38 because we're going to be rolling out hopefully some positive updates on that front. I'm going to leave everybody in suspense as to what is going on there, but the basic format of it isn't going to change. So the podcast is essentially a mix of interviews with industry executives and other market observers and analysts, site people that watch the industry. Essentially, we try to take some of the conversations that aren't fit to write articles from sometimes, but newsmaker interviews are also very much a part of it.

Essentially, what we try to do is we try to cover all of the angles of the market, essentially, in a spoken form, whether that be interview of a CEO, for instance, not just the head of the FSIS and defense companies, but some of these commercial companies that have a head of federal that's a CEO equivalent. So that's one class of interview.

We have group discussions along the industry executives and peers that often work together about the tech trend, and it's a conversation just like what the three of us are having. Then we bring on some of the market observers, whose clients are the government contractors looking to win business, and they also bring an interesting perspective on some of the things that their clients are selling them about the business, legal, and regulatory environments and that helps. So when you put those three elements of guests together, well, you can see the entire picture of what we're trying to accomplish.

Carolyn:

I'm sure it would be helpful for me to listen. What we've been talking about today, it's so complicated. There's so many layers. I mean, I can't even get my head around the amount of money and-

Ross:

Well, that should tell you that this is a real industry just like in the same way that energy, healthcare, construction, you name it.

Carolyn:

Contracting is real industry. Yeah.

Ross:

Well, it is, and it's not even an industry or a market. When you look the size of it, it's really an economy because the US government, somebody told me this a long time ago and it's still stuck with me, is USG is Fortune 1. They buy every single thing that you can think of, and you can add up all the commercial enterprises in the world and they don't have the buying power or diversity that the US government provides. So it's complicated, sure, but when you get past the, we'll say the nerdom of procurement and acquisition and the way that the government is required by law to buy things, I will never say that it's simple because the world of business and economics, journalism is complicated to begin with, but when you start to look at it from that lens of how consequential it is, then it starts to become more real, and not just a world of jargon and legalies and such.

Mark:

Ross, if you look at the GDP of the United States and you say that government spending or that is a third of the GDP in the country, there are only two or three countries in the world that are larger than that.

Carolyn:

Yeah, and I've heard that before, what you just said, Ross, that the US government is a Fortune 1.

Mark:

Fortune 1.

Carolyn:

Absolutely. Yeah. So all right, let's leave this nerdom for the next nerdom.

Mark:

Hold on, hold on. Can I go back and just ask one question?

Carolyn:

Yeah.

Mark:

So you mentioned, and I agree with you, the world doesn't revolve around the Capital Beltway as far as everything related to what we're talking about. However, I wanted to get your take. Quick take on Raytheon and Boeing moving their headquarters to the Capital Beltway.

Ross:

This is one I got a little bit. I got some interesting feedback on my take for this. I think that's more reflective of what's going on at Raytheon and Boeing than the Northern Virginia economy because I am a noted skeptic of the impact that corporate headquarters have on local economies. Now, if you're a Nova economy watcher, the postscript of that is the thing to watch is the tech campus that Boeing is trying to build in Northern Virginia and capture the effect of what Amazon is trying to do with its second quarters in Crystal City. That HQ2 thing is going to change all of our lives in ways we aren't even thinking of now, okay?

Boeing is trying to capture a little bit of that by building an innovation and education type campus where they can essentially try to capture that, capture some of the investments that Amazon is putting into the education ecosystem in Northern Virginia. You can call it the state of Virginia as part of their move into Virginia, right?

Carolyn:

Are you suggesting that Amazon at least inspired Boeing to do this? This is because of an Amazon move?

Ross:

So it's my opinion, but if you read between the lines on Boeing's announcement. I encourage people to go back and read the announcement, the announcements of Raytheon and Boeing moving their corporate headquarters. Now, let's take the headquarters alone by itself. How many jobs? They don't say. What kind of construction are they going to do? They don't say. Raytheon's announcement is very, it's bland and boring in nature. Now, it's important to Raytheon to be in Washington. That is not in dispute. So when I talk about the importance, this is more from a Nova economic perspective, right?

The Boeing announcement about the move of their corporate headquarters from Chicago to Northern Virginia, there is a lot more detail in it about the campus that I'm talking about than the corporate headquarters of high ranking executives, including ostensibly the CEO to have an office here. Boeing is not far from the only company in the region that is trying to capture whatever HQ2 is going to be in Northern Virginia, and again, it's going to change our lives in ways we don't really think of right now.

Carolyn:

Can we switch nerdoms now?

Mark:

We can switch. That's just been-

Carolyn:

No, I'm glad you brought it up. It's interesting. All right. So we want to go to our Tech Talk questions. We have time for just a couple quick fun questions for you. I'm going to kick it off with I'd love to know what you think the next big leap in technology will be, Ross.

Ross:

I'll tell you the one I'm most interested in watching the next big leap of. So one of the hats that I wear at WT is I watch the telecommunications space, so including the wireless carriers and even the satellite network carriers too because there's so much overlap, and I'm going to do a little show and tell, right? There's enough overlap, I believe, between this iPhone that I'm doing a little show and tell with on the screen and what's happening in the government space because what everybody in the government space, they want to have the same experience that I'm holding up to the camera here. They don't want too much specialization in case of security.

6G is apparently a thing that I learned about last year, and I am under the impression that some of the standards bodies around the world are already starting to maybe not write down what 6G is supposed to look like, but at least be prepared for 6G even when we see all these commercials of 5G being in all these different markets. I cannot tell you what 6G is supposed to look like because 5G is going to, again, it's going to transform the world in ways we don't understand. It's going to transform rural America in ways we don't understand because I'm-

Carolyn:

Yeah, 5G is still rolling out, right? We're not there yet.

Mark:

It just started.

Ross:

Yeah, we're not there yet. Yeah. It's not there yet. I'm not going to say that it's impactful, not impactful to lot of us that are in urban areas. We'll get a different spectrum and faster phones. Where you'll see the real effect of this advancement of 5G and 6G is in places like rural America that are just not building cable and fiber optic infrastructure in some of those area. It's not feasible, but we see what's going on with star length and some of the satellite constellations going up to tap into that. So I am intrigued by whatever it is that 6G looks like. It's just like HQ2, ways we aren't going to be able to picture right now.

Carolyn:

Yeah. All right. Mark, you get the last question.

Mark:

Well, this is my favorite question, and we never really get to ask this question, but if you had a magic wand and you could just invent a new technology, what would it be?

Ross:

A brand new technology.

Mark:

Well, you could can hark it or make a reality.

Ross:

Teleportation sounds cool.

Mark:

No, that's awesome. I like that one.

Carolyn:

That's a good one. I just finished a book about teleportation too, and the argument about how it worked in Star Trek and stuff, but why, I mean, other than cool?

Mark:

Time travel or just teleportation?

Carolyn:

Both.

Ross:

Well, this is going to reveal me as maybe a weak sauce individual. I am not one at this point in life that really likes big adventures, add another bush, and add in these places in nature where you're disconnected from everything and you're out there for 16 hours a day when all you have is what's in your backpack and this, I don't know, water bottle that I'm pulling up to the computer screening right now. That's less of my thing. So teleportation would be a nice shortcut to some of the places like the Appalachian Mountains or even some of these desert places in Africa where it's definitely hot to be there.

Mark:

So you're not going to be there Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. You're not going to be the first one to do this.

Ross:

No, not even.

Carolyn:

No. I love it. I love that you just want to do this for your own entertainment. That's awesome.

Ross:

Yeah. I find that I'm just a urban kid now that grew up in rural America, and I still love it, but I'm more of a day trip person out into wildlife especially as opposed to being out there for a weekend.

Carolyn:

Way to know yourself, Ross. I'm going to end it there. Ross, thank you so much for shedding some light. Like I said, the whole contracting world is incredibly complicated. You've certainly helped me understand a little bit more and some of the really important things that are happening right now. So thank you so much for taking time with us today on Tech Transforms.

Mark:

Thank you, Ross.

Ross:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Carolyn:

All right, and listeners, we will talk to you next week.

Thanks for joining Tech Transforms, sponsored by Dynatrace. For more Tech Transforms, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.