William McCormick
ExecutiveBiz spoke with David Kushner, vice president of federal sales, regarding ViON’s multi-cloud offerings and how the company is helping federal agencies modernize their IT infrastructure.
“Organizations have gone from cloud first to cloud smart and have a much better understanding of how to modernize their businesses without having to spend millions of dollars.â€
ExecutiveBiz: During your seven plus years with ViON, how would you describe your experience offering cyber analytics and cloud storage solutions to federal customers?
David Kushner: The federal market has realized data center consolidation and modernization truly is a mandate. No one gave our federal agencies a map. We’ve been at the forefront of the evolution of IT initiatives and helping customers learn how to modernize.
The changes we’ve seen in recent years have emphasized the need for flexibility and efficiency and created a strong growing demand for our as-a-Service model. Most of our customers realize they need to modernize, but don’t have big budgets. As-a-Service helps these organizations to figure out what needs to go to the cloud and what needs to stay behind a firewall on premise.
ExecutiveBiz: Last year, the ViON Marketplace launched as a single portal for as-a-Service IT solutions. Can you discuss how the platform maximizes efficiencies for federal clients?
David Kushner: Prior to the ViON Marketplace, there wasn’t a way for our customers to simply manage their solutions or to understand their options. Governance was a time-consuming process. The procurement and ordering process can take as long as six to nine months. Our federal agencies were looking for better speed and agility, which is why we devised the Marketplace.
Marketplace gives agencies the ability to order, provision and manage their solutions across multiple OEMs in one platform. The reporting and governance capabilities within ViON’s Marketplace are unique and provide a huge value add for organizations as they manage multiple technologies in their data center. These agencies can also shop and compare solutions to find the best fit for their technical requirements. I think the Marketplace is a phenomenal differentiator for ViON. It’s helped our customers manage their technology needs far more efficiently and bring on new innovative technology quickly.
ExecutiveBiz: What are the challenges implementing as-a-Service within government agencies? How are you easing the transition away from legacy IT systems?
David Kushner: In the federal market, there are so many legacy systems at play and federal agencies spend a lot of money to maintain these systems. Our customers want to identify the top priority applications and systems in order to prioritize within theirmodernization schedule. With our Data Center-as-a-Service model, they can modernize at their own pace and within their budget, in a true consumption model. They buy what they need and scale as their mission requirements change.
When talking about the challenges of implementing as-a-Service, one of the developments that has made a huge impact is the proliferation of the public cloud. It’s helped contracting officers understand our model better. We can focus on the CapEx versus OpEx challenges that federal agencies deal with, so they can manage their consumption at the program level and bring on the newest technology as needed.
ExecutiveBiz: What new services and platforms is ViON developing for the federal marketplace? What do the next 12-24 months look like?
David Kushner: As I look forward, workforce and specialty requirements are always changing as we modernize technology. You need to use different clouds for different workloads. Our customers need the flexibility to keep up with their data volume and manage costs. The Data Center-as-a-Service model is the end-to-end data management strategy that our customers  are turning to for the future.
Since technology is always changing, as-a-Service models allow our IT leaders to be more agile and react, recalibrate and reassess to drive mission success faster. Organizations have gone from cloud first to cloud smart and have a better understanding of how to modernize their businesses without having to spend millions of dollars.
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Before joining the ViON Corporation in 2011, David Kushner was the Industry Sales Manager for DellEMC, worked in Business Development for OTG Software and Sales with InterCon Systems.
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