Q&A: Warren Suss on Networx

Networx, the General Services Administration's massive, federal governmentwide contract vehicle for telecom and network services, is creeping back into awareness as the summer 2011 shut-off date for the current contract, FTS 2001, looms ever closer.

Congress has started asking why federal agencies haven't already transitioned; the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee says it's getting ready to hold a hearing. For every month that agencies don't transition, the federal government might be losing up to $18 million in unrealized savings. 

FierceGovernmentIT recently spoke with Warren Suss of Suss Consulting, a firm that closely tracks the federal telecommunications market.

FGIT: So how would you assess the Networx transition?

SUSS: There are two things worth paying attention to in terms of the transition from FTS 2001 to Networx. One of them is that under the new Networx contract, GSA tried to be forward looking, and to include advanced services that didn't exist under the prior contract, or at least didn't exist in the form that they're being offered now.

There are capabilities, for telework, for example, that are offered under Networx, there is unified messaging, collaboration, hosting--some of the hosting has been available in some forms under the prior contract. But, there was an attempt to use this new contract to capture the more advanced services, the higher layer services can now be acquired as part of network-based solutions.

And in many cases, some of these advanced services had been previously treated by agencies from the application perspective, where agencies hosted them in their own data centers and used integrators and other contractors to provide these services.

Part of the challenge of achieving the potential of the program is to get agencies to buy into this new view, that you can buy capabilities and web services as applications on the network, versus developing, running and operating them yourself.

That aspect of the program, I believe, offers the government a tremendous potential value proposition. The transition is really focused on turning off existing services on FTS 2001 and replacing them with more or less equivalent services on Networx. But agencies have the potential to buy a new class of services on the Networx contract that weren't available before, or certainly weren't widely used before on the previous contract.

The benefits here include the ability of agencies to offload a lot of the costs of administering, operating and upgrading these advanced services on their own and putting those costs on the shoulder of the network vendors. There are efficiencies and economies that could be archived if agencies took advantage of these new services.

That, by and large, has not happened, yet. I think many agencies, even those who were moving up to a more EOIP infrastructure have still not yet made that transition from the agency run and owned applications to applications that reside in the cloud.

And that's the second untapped potential of the Networx contract, by and large--that this contract could become the platform for the next generation of federal cloud computing,.

FGIT: But cloud computing didn't exist at the time the RFP was put together.

SUSS: There certainly were capabilities, including the hosting, design and engineering of managed network services and unified messaging that provided a framework for cloud computing. And in many ways, cloud computing is just a new name for stuff that has been around for a long time. Application service provider type solution.

But, the political push for cloud computing absolutely came after the Networx contract acquisition strategy had been formulated, because it's the new administration that is putting on the heavy push toward cloud computing,

I think these are two aspects--the new services and the cloud computing capability--that are TBD. That's the next thing to watch.

FGIT: How would you assess the pace of transition?

SUSS: Slow. No question about it--compared to expectations, the transition has been slower, slower than GSA was expecting. I think slower than most of the agencies initially were expecting.

FGIT: Why is that?

SUSS: It's hard to know exactly. There are a lot of factors that contribute to the slow speed of transition. To some degree, GSA is the victim of its own success. GSA has done an impressive job providing the agencies not only with low cost service, but they've off-loaded a lot of the agency administrative requirements associated with running, managing, installing and operating their networks.

As a result, the agencies have been running lean and mean in the network, telecom arena, so when it came time for the Networx transitions, many of the agencies weren't staffed up. Furthermore, the FTS 2001 contract, the predecessor contract, was a very successful contract, agencies were not dealing with major contract problems so they were putting their limited time and resources on other areas.

Of course, there is the financial issue that. The government, according to GSA, has been losing approximately $18 million dollars a month for every month that they're not transitioning, and that's creating some pressures.

FGIT: If staffing is a problem, what's the resolution?

SUSS: GSA has definitely turned up the heat. GSA is definitely twisting agencies' arms harder to get transition moving. I believe it's having results. When Ed O'Hare [head of GSA's Integrated Technology Services] came in to run ITS, accelerating the speed of transition was one of his top priorities. The political attention that it's bringing is also going to help move things along, and there has been a major effort on GSA's part to highlight the transition requirements to the CIO Council and, basically, to do whatever they can to make noises and to twist arms.

So, that's number one--just by raising the political profile, I think they're succeeding in accelerating the speed of transition.

Number two, the agencies did have some basic blocking and tackling that they had to accomplish, and at this point most of that has been accomplished. Agencies had to conduct their inventories, they had to design their acquisition strategies for their fair opportunity acquisition strategy. By and large, that's already been done.

FGIT: Didn't agencies have to submit their inventories already, back in 2007, when Networx was awarded?

SUSS: That's true, they did have to submit their inventories initially. Unfortunately, what happened was due to the delays - inventory is a dynamic issue, so in some cases agencies that did submit their inventories had to bring them up to date again following the delays.

FGIT: So agencies have been doing their telecom inventories twice?

SUSS: That's right, they had to go back and update it. Agency networks are very dynamic. Whatever they came out with the initial submission got stale pretty quickly.