William McCormick
John Mengucci, president and CEO of CACI International and two-time Wash100 Award recipient, recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz for the publication’s latest Executive Spotlight interview to discuss how the company is addressing the most challenging IT modernization and national security efforts, CACI’s recent major contract award wins and the recent spike in revenue and company growth.
“With 60 years of success with our employees and shareholders, we know that our strong culture of ethics and innovation, integrity and ethics is always going to be here. We focus very much on operational excellence. We always have strong foundational elements. At the end of the day, that’s what drives growth from a financial side, but it also drives career growth for our employees.”
You can read the full Executive Spotlight with John Mengucci below.
About IT Modernization & National Security Missions
ExecutiveBiz: What do other federal agencies need to know about CACI and its advanced capabilities as the company continues to address our most challenging IT modernization efforts and national security missions?
John Mengucci: “CACI is a growing expertise and technology company for enterprise and mission customers. We focus on our core markets: digital solutions, ISR, cyber, and space as well as engineering services and enterprise IT mission support.
One area that is top of mind for us is expanding our business in space. We have significant work related to space, and it’s very much a top priority for us to build upon that momentum to offer robust technologies to our customers in all areas of the space domain.
We’re also looking to push advanced data analytics and visualization tools. We’re using artificial intelligence and machine learning to sort of learn from the current set of threats and translate that information to actionable decisions that will ultimately provide much better protection for all of us.
We’re going to place high value on digital modernization and digital solutions towards national security tech technologies. These are going to solve a lot of our customers’ digital modernization challenges. CACI has the unique ability to combine agile at scale methodologies, as well as coupling that with our deep customer understanding to modernize applications, infrastructure, and business processes.
The more that we can bring modern technologies like AI, advanced analytics, automation in the cloud, then our solutions can achieve actionable results by putting the customer in the loop to really understand what they have to get from that information and handle what their mission needs are more adeptly.”
About CACI Financial Results & Product Differentiation
ExecutiveBiz: In August, CACI reported full-year results, including 5.7% growth in full FY 2021 revenue. How will you work to maintain this level of success and growth while also improving your product differentiation to create value for your shareholders and customers?
John Mengucci: “I’ll say that I’m extremely pleased. We’re very confident in our expertise and technology. They are at the forefront of our customer’s needs and very strategically aligned to their primary missions. We often talk about investing ahead of need and that happens best when we get those opportunities to sit with our customers before an RFP is written to really understand what their needs are and how their mission is changing.
Over the coming months, we’re going to have a lot of great demonstrations around space tech, advancing speed to fleet for the Navy, electronic warfare, and secure communications using SteelBox®. Additionally, our SkyTracker® technologies are looking at a wide variety of different counter UAS solutions.
And as we talked about earlier, we are going to continue to double down on AI and our Agile Solution Factory. When I think about where the company goes next, I think about our technology and our people. I’m confident that we’ll continue to be in a strong position, provide value to our customers and continue to earn their business.
Dr. Jack London spent a lot of time talking about making sure that we win every single recompete we have. Jack always used to say on the few of them that we lost, he’d always make us say, ‘You got fired and nothing hurts more. And that’s not virtual reality. That’s actually true reality.’
With 60 years of success with our employees and shareholders, we know that our strong culture of ethics and innovation, integrity and ethics is always going to be here. We focus very much on operational excellence. We always have strong foundational elements. At the end of the day, that’s what drives growth from a financial side, but it also drives career growth for our employees.
We are extremely agile. We listen to every great idea and a lot of those great ideas have turned into new marketing areas since the company was founded and we absolutely believe we have the right mix to continue to grow.”
About Customer Engagement & Training
ExecutiveBiz: Congrats on the new office in Reston as well. Can you explain how the CRADLE will continue to drive your company’s development and innovation for new capabilities and better engagement with your customers?
John Mengucci: “First and foremost, we’re very happy to call Reston our new home. What we had done through various acquisitions over the last 10 to 12 years was to spread out across Northern Virginia that pertains to our corporate functions and where we wanted to bring customers.
We wanted to have advanced research, application development, learning and an engagement center. What we call the CRADLE, or the Center for Research Application Development Learning, and Engagement, is not a lab. It’s more of a collaboration hub or incubator focused on innovation and engagement.
There are numerous round tables and a lot of open workspaces where customers can come in and directly collaborate with us. It’s not like bringing them into the traditional hardware lab where you see test benches but a place where we can collaborate to guide us in areas we need to invest ahead of need.
We developed the CRADLE with our customers in mind and we wanted them to have a firsthand experience with technology capabilities and our teams, so they can fully understand and unlock where they want to go next with us. That’s where the real collaboration begins.
The CRADLE is for CACI employees coming to customers and partners in both industry and academia. In addition, we’ve got a near 300-person internship program that we’re working on and it’s right here in our corporate headquarters building.
I get the ability to stop by during lunch and ask some of our interns what they’re working on, on any given day. I must tell you; they absolutely blow my mind. They actually make this vision of having somewhere for folks of all backgrounds and all ages can sit down and sort of lay out what the art of the possible is and can be.”
Visit ExecutiveBiz.com’s Executive Spotlight Page to learn more about the most significant leaders of consequence to the government contracting (GovCon) and federal sectors and their experiences driving growth, new business and capabilities in the fiercely competitive federal landscape.
About DTRA and CACI Critical Missions
ExecutiveBiz: Congrats on the major $1.4B task order win on Tuesday. Can you elaborate on the makings of this significant win and how it will utilize CACI’s more than 14 years of experience working with DTRA’s critical mission objectives? How will this task order win will allow CACI to expand its capabilities to protect our nation’s security from multi-faceted threats?
John Mengucci: “This is a task order with a total contract value of about $1.4 billion to provide a variety of technology to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). We have supported this customer and its predecessor organizations since 2006, and we’ve provided forward deployed embedded support to both conventional and special operations forces around the globe.
We’re going to be really looking at shifting from an operation that is primarily focused on counter-terrorism and disrupting adversary networks to increasingly complicated requirements using our technology to counter the threats posed by nation states that are capable of trans national actors, as well as near peer competitors.
We’re going to continue to support DTRA and what we’ve been doing with them since 2006. When I talk about operations, it was more embedded ops. We’re out on the battlefield with the traditional forces as well as special operations. In a more operational setting, this is really going to move us more towards advanced analytics, AI, and intelligence analysis.
We’re just starting to do embedded advisory support and operational planning, but we’re also going to start to support DTRA with threat assessments and technology applications to help the development and operational effects for our warfighters.
We’re moving more to the tactical edge and providing groundbreaking analytical capabilities that worked to help commanders contend with threats in the gray zone that exists between sort of peace and calm and conflict.
We’re going to use our mission and expertise from the 15 years we’ve supported them, but we’re also going to be bringing in new updated technology and advanced capabilities. The commanders are going to need to understand and counter these increasing threats.
We’ll be moving from just providing people and an operation setting to delivering technology for us to better inform command commanders against the new plethora of threats.”
About Legacy Test Systems for Air Force
ExecutiveBiz: With the more recent $496M USAF contract, what are the specific improvements and challenges you’re hoping to address for the service branch’s modernization efforts across legacy test systems?
John Mengucci: “This contract actually expands previous work that we’ve been doing with the U.S. Air Force for some time. What we do here is we take CACI program engineers and software developers, and we create and execute critical test automations that look across multiple airframes, weapons systems, and subsystems.
In addition, we take CACI software methodologies, like those we are working on in the CRADLE, and our robust industrial process controls and quality systems to advance their mission. These are really complex test sets that we both engineer and write all the testing scripts to. After that, we run those test scripts and provide the information. We are getting into the more complex component subsystems and system testing.
In this particular contract, we’ll be doing automated tests for much simpler components. We sort of graduated frankly from the more straightforward, automated tests into building the actual test set. It’s about mechanical and electrical engineering, and then building all of the software tests that ride on that.
As we do that work, we continue to move up that value chain of supplying customers with automated testing equipment. It was a really nice contract win for us and I’m really excited to be doing more with the service branch’s customers and we hope to take those types of capabilities and move them across all the other services.”
