Marion Square attended Carahsoft’s 3rd Annual Marketing Summit on November 1st, 2023. Co-Founder and CEO Harvey Morrison presented with Carahsoft’s Vice President, Mike Shrader to discuss best practices for both large and small vendors looking to sell to the Federal Government.

The overarching theme around a CR to keep in mind is that CR's reduce the amount of time an agency has to complete a solicitation. Instead of a 12 month window to conduct market research, identify contracting vehicles and approaches to procurement, meet with vendors, etc agencies timeframes are compressed. If the FY 24 budgets aren't approved until Dec (which is the current consensus) then agencies will only have 9 to 10 months to complete their work or risk loosing their funding at year end.

The FY 24 budget includes $210B for federal research and development (R&D), this is the largest ever investment for Federal R&D.

Artificial Intelligence R&D is a main focus area for FY 24 investment with several agencies requesting $1B to fund AI research projects and programs in areas such as:

• Facial recognition technology

• Drone systems

• Systems to analyze large amounts of data

• Cyber Security

• Post Quantum Cryptography is becoming a focus area with the release of May 22nd National Security Memo- initial standards are being released by NIST. Though the FY 2024 budget request sees several investments in advancing quantum computing R&D, contractors will begin to see funding and needs in cyber budgets for PQC transitions as early as FY 2025.

The US Government is signaling its future cyber priorities with a recently released OMB Memo M-23-18 "The Administrations Cyber Priorities for FY 25" M-23-18 (whitehouse.gov). The memo instructs Federal Agencies to prioritize budgeting/funding around the key initiatives specifically outlined within the memo. In reading the memo, one will notice that several of the priorities are a continuation of funded initiatives that are currently going through the budget approval process as part of the FY24 budget.

Over the last couple of months there has been quite a bit of news regarding the recently passed Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) which raised the US Government debt limit until Jan 1 2025. Vendors who sell to the US Government are wondering what effects this bill will have on Federal spending in the coming years and how best to plan and execute their Government go to market sales strategies.

At Marion Square, we continually research and analyze Federal Agency IT budgets and key spend priorities for our clients. This time of year, is especially busy because agencies have begun releasing and justifying their budget requests for FY24. This information provides organizations selling into Government with critical insights into key Government spending priorities and trends for the upcoming fiscal year, which is only 5 months away.

The Federal Government’s FY24 budge request includes record R&D requests, specifically for critical and emerging technologies (CET), artificial intelligence (AI), cyber, citizen experience, quantum and 5G.

The Administration has stated that the2024 budget request aims to tap into the strengths of cutting-edge technologies like digital identity and artificial intelligence (AI) while restructuring the security capabilities of software and cloud services used by the Federal Government.

Marion Square continues to highlight the importance of not only understanding the landscape regarding budgets, funded programs, and initiatives, but also the criticality of ensuring your message and go to market sales motions are "tuned" for a Government audience.

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning and Quantum Computing - Specifically Post Quantum Cryptography are two high priority emerging technologies the Federal Government is spending on.

Marion Square’s Co-Founders Harvey Morrison and Greg Imahara attended the recently completed AFWERX Innovation Conference held in San Antonio Texas. (2023 Innovation Industry Days (eventsquid.com))

The conference was attended by over 100 innovative technology companies that are interested in the AFWERX/SpaceWerx SBIR/STTR programs and key program offices inside of both AFWERX and SpaceWerx.

Emerging Technologies: Carahsoft’s 2nd Annual Marketing Summit

Working with clients we often times hear, "opportunities in our sales pipeline never seem to close". At Marion Square, we categorize Government sales opportunities along a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum are opportunities with an identified budget line item and a clear mandate to make a purchase, similar to the Government’s current Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) mandate which agencies are budgeting for today. On the other end of the spectrum, you have sales opportunities that can best be described by the Government’s comments " we like your technology, it solves a problem, we really need it", but there is currently no line item budget or mandate for this technology.