Executive Spotlight: Mike Tocci, President of Paperless Innovations

Mike Tocci, president of Paperless Innovations, recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz regarding the impact of zero-trust capabilities in the federal landscape as well as how recent partnerships are helping the company expand its position in the market and the significant changes occurring in the contract bidding process during the latest Executive Spotlight interview.

You can read the full interview with Mike Tocci below.

ExecutiveBiz: How have recent partnerships been able to assist Paperless Innovations expand its position in the federal marketplace, drive innovation and new capabilities and ultimately help complete your company’s mission?

Mike Tocci: “At Paperless Innovations, we have a core mission to do things that aren’t being done anywhere else across the government space. We found out very quickly that partnerships are absolutely critical in this market. It’s one thing to have smart people throughout your company, but you can’t have every smart person in the world working in your organization.

Developing and maintaining partnerships with the best firms are a core mandate and competency here at Paperless Innovations. This orchestrated collaboration with key partners allows us to focus our core mission to provide an incredible level of oversight and automation in support of Government Purchase Cards (GPC) programs.

For Paperless Innovations, it’s a consideration of build vs. buy when providing tools for our constituents. There are a number of good examples. One is our integration with industry leaders like Okta, an identity-as-a-service provider.

We selected Okta to meet both government and commercial sector requirements like Zero Trust, SSO and PIV. Paperless Innovations could have built the tools to authenticate with PIV cards, but it’s a much better decision to go to a provider who’s already in the space and deals with identity management, Zero Trust and the types of high-level identity related security issues at the top of the industry.

The new element is being able to form relationships with dominant supply chain firms such as Amazon Business or Fisher Scientific. Our company can take their presence in the marketplace and build best practices for commercial tooling in our system to solve tough challenges.

Moving forward, we can take the lessons learned and previous tools built for commercial business and provide that same level of capability for the federal government. Our business is bridging the gap between the government and commercial worlds, which drives significant value for the public sector.

In addition, we cannot overlook the importance of cloud infrastructure. As a result, we made a number of early decisions such as adopting Amazon Web Services (AWS). We were born in the cloud application world.

Through the AWS technology partner track, we have a highly durable, available and secure platform equipped with all the security you’d expect across the layers of our application. That allows us to focus on our customers and help drive their missions.

If we had to manage an infrastructure storage network manually, we would never be able to focus on what we’re good at in our business.”

ExecutiveBiz: With zero-trust technology becoming a major focal point moving forward, what can you tell us about the difficulties of implementing Zero Trust architectures and focusing on data security?

Mike Tocci: “Zero Trust is one of the biggest buzzwords out there, and for good reason in today’s myriad threat landscape. Just like the discussion for partnerships, you would have to touch every area of your system if you’re trying to do Zero Trust from the very beginning.

As a result, partnerships are very important to ensure an authentic Zero Trust system. The idea is that we don’t want any implicit trust relationships in Actus. Paperless Innovations employs a well-known principle of ‘trust once, always verify’ so that any enterprise can be a source of truth for accessing IT solutions.

If they hire ‘Sally’ on Monday, we should be able to have a provision for the account on the same day. That source of truth can be an HR-driven type of interaction needed to maintain a full Zero Trust relationship while also implementing a truth-based correlation of person, role, and permissions with the solutions provider.

At Paperless Innovations, we are capable of integrating with identity providers while conducting interactions with enterprises in a Zero Trust modality. We are at the top of our game in terms of technical security and that allows us to work with the HR-driven IT provisioning at the enterprise level.”

ExecutiveBiz: What are the most significant ways that Paperless Innovations is working to advance its contract bidding offerings and processes in order to drive company growth and establish yourself as a big player in the GovCon sector?

Mike Tocci: “We focused on three key missions; 1) To deliver world-class SaaS Procurement Workflow Automations that support the ‘triumvirate’ of public spending – Accountability, Compliance and Transparency, 2) To maintain secure access and interactions at all times to our automations and, 3) To provide scalable Customer Services and Support that delight our users.

Paperless Innovations is a very nimble company, which is something that keeps us extremely competitive. We focus on creating unique value by delivering cloud-based solutions that elevate the lives of procurement professionals and their administrative and oversight constituents.

FedRAMP was also an essential cornerstone requirement in our government strategy. The FedRAMP Marketplace provides firms like us a centrally administered authorization that government agencies can use across the entire government space.

From a contract standpoint, that process reduces a huge amount of the burden from individual agencies. From a strategic standpoint, FedRAMP is the best path forward to develop rapid contracting for us as a sole-source provider or through our contracting partners including Carahsoft. Carahsoft is the leader in maintaining access to great SaaS solutions through NASA SEWP, GSA schedules and many other vehicles.

Scalability is native to our infrastructure through our posture with AWS. To further ensure scalability, Paperless Innovations has a partnership with KECH, Inc, a WOSB and HUBZone company for customer support.

They’re able to provide a massive amount of attention through multiple call centers throughout the time zones required for national response in support of contractual service level agreements (SLAs).  Our customers are extremely delighted with our delivery of services and support.

In fact, one of the most underappreciated benefits of dealing with small business from the federal government’s perspective is that we are able to turn on a dime and implement different features to adhere to new policy or change in regulatory guidance. We don’t have the institutional lags that would cause delays in rolling out something important or making an internal change.

Our team is extremely excited about what we have to offer. As a comprehensive sole source for these world-class solutions, our company couldn’t be better positioned for growth in the Public Sector.”