From the start, the IBM Ecosystem efforts in the federal market have been driven by the needs of government agencies in alignment with Executive Orders on cybersecurity, citizen services, supply chain and sustainability.

Our approach is to work across the ecosystem with strategic and specialized business partners, developers and systems integrators to develop holistic solutions enabled by IBM technology. This is already proving effective, expanding in reach and impact.

For example, we help accelerate time to value by connecting our small and minority-owned business partners to the skills, mentoring and teaming opportunities to aid in their government business development efforts. A case in point is the launch of Camelot, a suite of cybersecurity solutions that encompasses testing, threat detection, incident response and adaptive threat intelligence. Camelot grew out of DigiFlight, a veteran- and minority-owned, small business that’s part of the IBM Ecosystem.

DigiFlight president and CEO Stanford Oliver said, “The IBM Ecosystem partnership was instrumental in our ability to create the Camelot Secure360 cybersecurity solution and allowed us to offer the federal government an integrated strategy for battling the constantly shifting threat landscape.”

Expanding opportunities

We know that a diverse partner ecosystem is smarter, more innovative, more collaborative, and can improve the entire ecosystem's ability to create and deliver world-class services and solutions.

One of the ways we drive this diversity and engagement is to make resources, tools and cooperative connections available to all partners, and those tools include:

• A revamped system for skilling for registered IBM Ecosystem partners that provides them with access to the training, badges, and selling enablement materials also available to IBMers.
• IBM Client Engineering, our co-creation process that pairs IBM technology experts with clients and partners to develop solutions that use IBM technology and methodologies.
• Expansion of our embeddable AI software portfolio with the release of new libraries designed to help IBM Ecosystem partners, clients and developers more easily, quickly and cost-effectively build their own AI-powered solutions and bring them to market. We’ve made available educational assets via TechZone and tutorials that support our partners every step of the way.
• Differentiated, customized opportunities to help our small and minority-owned business partners thrive in an increasingly competitive federal government environment with the expansion of our curriculum with George Mason University Center for Government Contracting to include IBM Ecosystem partner Four Inc. Participating small and minority-owned businesses can learn from Four Inc. some of the ins and outs of financial and contract management when working with the federal government.

Progress on zero trust

In 2022, we organized a zero trust working group to help accelerate federal progress on the administration’s Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity. The working group identified six gaps in our support of the government’s path to zero trust. We created the following assets to address the identified gaps: zero trust lexicon, maturity model and roadmap for implementation of zero trust.

Michael Epley, chief architect and security strategist for Red Hat, and a member of the working group, said, “Applying the concepts of open source, that have defined the Red Hat strategy, to support our federal government clients in their zero trust journey has delivered meaningful impact in record time.”

Working group member Paul Dant, senior director, cybersecurity strategy and research for Illumio said, “This kind of synergy is exciting, and I think it’s an example of the value we can cocreate with the ecosystem approach. The assets help us work together to close government cyber gaps.”

Governments and businesses across the globe—including IBM—are working to develop quantum strategies, while beginning to implement quantum safe security. On December 8, IBM convened a virtual quantum computing update that included an overview of IBM’s Quantum Development Roadmap, and instruction on how federal agencies can meet the immediate term requirements set forth by the administration to prepare for a post-quantum world.

In another zero trust initiative, Red Hat is collaborating with Raytheon Intelligence & Space (RI&S) to combine RI&S’s new zero trust security platform REDPro ZTX (also known as Zero Trust eXtended) with Red Hat® OpenShift® at enterprise scale. REDPro ZTX is a future-proof, open standards-based zero trust integration platform that facilitates plug-and-play and vendor-agnostic applications. By pairing REDProZTX with Red Hat OpenShift, an enterprise Kubernetes platform, RI&S’s clients will have access to scalable, rapid and enhanced security deployments across different operational technology and IT environments.

Going to market together

The technology itself is only part of our value proposition. We also invest with partners to generate awareness of our joint solutions. For example, our current comarketing campaign with General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT)—GDIT and IBM: Partners in Cyber Innovation—promotes awareness of our partnership to deploy joint solutions that enable cloud security, cyber threat hunting and incident response, and help secure the software supply chain.

Enabling federal IT transformation

As agencies continue their IT modernization journeys, they need assistance in transforming their legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to intelligent ERP systems on hybrid cloud-based platforms. One important step in this process is intelligently integrating large volumes of dispersed data and leveraging automation and AI to provide actionable insights. To better serve federal agencies, we’re expanding and deepening our strategic partnerships.

For example, IBM brings a pre-integrated data fabric and embedded AI tools to federal agencies with IBM Cloud Pak for Data, a unified data and AI platform that is designed to connect the right data, at the right time, to the right people anywhere. Available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace, it’s hybrid cloud ready.

Today, IBM and AWS are jointly engaged in building solutions for many government agencies, as well as for integrators that provide solutions to the federal government. One result of IBM’s close partnership with AWS is a jointly architected threat-management solution consisting of managed security services in conjunction with QRadar SIEM architecture for hybrid environments. This solution can be used by government agencies to rapidly launch applications on AWS.

As you can see, we’ve made meaningful progress in supporting the federal government’s efforts to address critical issues—proof that when we come together, we can do amazing things. We’re ready to take the next steps to amplify our impact even more—join us! Learn more here, and get in touch here.