60 Seconds with David Hawkins
Director of Unified Communications & Network Engineering, Apptis Technology Solutions

For the past 12 years, David Hawkins has served in various senior technical and business development roles for Apptis and Apptis Technology Solutions, or ATS (www.apptis.com/ats), supervising complex projects and acting as the senior project manager, technical advisor, and executive-level client liaison with clients such as DIA, DOJ, SSA, FDA, Commerce, DISA, GSA, and other Defense and Intelligence agencies.

 

Recently Yours Truly talked to Hawkins about unified communications as it relates to the U.S. Federal Government.

 

DH: The ATS division of Apptis is a product reseller/VAR business, providing full lifecycle services, and consultative services associated with the products we deliver. We're a global company with 250 employees and $500 million in revenue. Our skillsets continue to mature over time. Since 2007 the solutions we've developed in UC have also matured.

One thing that we highlight most about our value differentiation is our passion for the mission, particularly with the Federal Government, the DoD and IC. Our core group of people come from that mission and understand what it takes to get the job done. We look at technology as an enabler to help the customer succeed with their business or mission. It's one thing to drop in a box or a solution and walk away from the customer, it's another to partner with them to ensure that whatever we're delivering has a defined impact.

ATS has three core competency areas: Data centers, converged networking and client optimization. We do handle UC and other areas. We see a big push within the Federal Government to optimize their data centers based upon the demands that the see within the market, to consolidate and to do more with less. We leverage a virtual model where our experts in the pertinent fields are distributed globally and they collaborate on solutions for our customers. It allows us to do more with less.

 

These days there's less focus on UC in certain markets, specifically the commercial area. However, customers we've worked with over the years still have UC on their radar. They have aging PBXs that must be replaced or updated. That's not going to go away, even with the economic downturn. They still must do infrastructure updates. Moreover, there's the need to access various forms of media and the demand to be able to share information is increasing, and the only way they can do that is to modernize their communication infrastructures. So the demand is there, and they have to adapt. So I don't see UC going away as a result of the economy. Instead, we see reprioritization.

One challenge we run up against is the U.S. government's understanding of what UC is. I still hear frequently the terms ‘Voice over IP' or ‘VoIP', ‘telephony' and ‘convergence'. I also hear ‘unified communications' but there's different definitions for that, depending on who you're talking to within the Federal space. We find ourselves educating the client as what the terms mean and how they're different. This is compounded by the fact that there's been an evolution of the technology over time. We were dealing with VoIP ten years ago and now we've graduated to ‘UC'. If they understand the differences, they can realize the full benefit of what UC brings to them and their mission.

RG: What about mobility?

DH: Government leadership looks out to the private sector,
seeing the speed of information and decision-making increase because of the plethora of applications available there, the power of social networking and the integration of mobile communications into those networks. But those apps in most cases aren't available to the Federal space, and certainly not the DoD or intelligence community because of their closed networks. It's more of a political than a technical issue. So they're asking how they can embrace technologies such as UC and still maintain security and compliance within their environment. Those discussions are ongoing. They see social networks as a powerful tool, as well as mobility. They want to integrate them into their communications architecture already based on voice, video and IM. They want to bring all of these tools together as a single seamless architecture and ultimately try to drive increased efficiencies, interoperability and speed of decision-making to levels they don't have today. All of that's being talked about. Of course, it's another thing as to how they will execute plans to achieve this.