Since its inception in 2004, Carahsoft has become the leading trusted government technology solutions provider. Lacey Wean, Carahsoft’s Director of Autonomy and Robotics, works with technology companies to assist with their government go-to-market strategy. In this interview, Wean discusses the value proposition for  the vendors, customers and partners that Carahsoft serves, including technology manufacturers, government agencies and a large ecosystem of resellers, implementation partners, systems integrators and thousands of adjunct organizations and technologies.  

Carahsoft is always on the lookout for innovative companies, bringing fresh ideas, products and services to the government technology space. Read on to learn more about the Carahsoft partner ecosystem and how your organization can become a part of it. 

Dawn Zoldi: Lacey, first tell us a bit about you. 

Lacey Wean: I’ve been with Carahsoft for a little over 11 years now. My focus has been in tech sales, primarily with the public sector. That includes defense, intelligence, Federal civilian agencies, state and local business. I manage several business units and also lead a sales team focused on those business units including: geospatial, autonomy and robotics, law enforcement technology, Oracle and other emerging tech. My team works with technology companies to assist with their government go-to-market strategy. 

Dawn Zoldi: What does Carahsoft do?  

Lacey Wean: At the core, we are a sales and marketing company specifically focused on selling technology to the government as a one-stop-shop for their technology needs. There are really three customers that we serve: (1) technology manufacturers to help sell their products and market those products to government agencies; (2) government agencies to keep them informed of new innovative technologies and to help them acquire the technology that they need and (3) a large ecosystem of resellers, implementation partners, systems integrators and thousands of partners that can help enable our vendors to grow their business and help the government meet their needs.  

Dawn Zoldi: You mentioned the government as your primary customer set. Do you work with, for example, critical infrastructure customers in the private sector, who also have a need for this kind of technology? 

Lacey Wean: While our primary focus is on the public sector, it does expand a little bit beyond that into some other relevant or adjacent markets. Critical infrastructure is definitely one of those. We also work with private and public health care agencies. We have a ton of business in education, from higher ed to K through 12. There's a couple other adjacent markets that we're expanding into as well. 

Dawn Zoldi: How are you organized to help support these various stakeholders? 

Lacey Wean: We’re organized in two different ways. First, we have dedicated sales teams that are focused on some of our larger manufacturers like VMWare, Adobe, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle. Those sales teams are highly trained in the products and focused specifically on that technology manufacturer. Second, we also have technology vertical teams focused around government initiatives or relevant technology sets, such as geospatial, cyber, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), mobility and 5G. Our autonomy and robotics team is a separate team within these verticals. The sales teams that assist here handle multiple manufacturers within each vertical. 

Dawn Zoldi: Can you explain what you mean by the term “technology vertical.” 

Lacy Wean: Basically a technology vertical consists of a set of products that we group together that are focused on some specific government trends, initiatives or requirements. For example, we’ve got a group of technologies that are just focused on cyber security. We probably have about 100 companies in that technology vertical, ranging from core cyber security providers to  more niche areas of cyber security that are part of that business. The same can be said for our AI/ML vertical and our geospatial vertical.  

Dawn Zoldi: How do you provide tailored solutions for your customers? 

Lacey Wean: All of our customers have different use cases and needs. We bring the various solutions together to create an end-to-end solution that's right for that specific customer and the use case that they're trying to accomplish. 

 

Dawn Zoldi: I’d like to focus on Carahsoft’s autonomy and robotics vertical. Tell us about the origins of that technology vertical. 

Lacey Wean: Our autonomy and robotics business spun out of that geospatial business. Carahsoft has been in the geospatial business since about 2006. I was part of our geospatial team when I first started in the company and helped contribute towards growing that over the last 11 or so years. We've expanded beyond just traditional GIS software and into some adjacent areas such as architecture engineering, construction technology (e.g., products for facilities building), analytics as well as space management and satellite imagery. We have about 80 partners that have a geospatial focus.  

As we took a look at developing geospatial requirements over the past couple years, we saw a need for an end-to-end solution for the government’s UAS, autonomy and robotics needs. Starting about six years ago, we noticed an increasing need for U.S.-made or TAA (Trade Agreements Act) compliant drones when the federal government started banning Chinese drones. We did some research and consulted with you, Dawn, and used that information to start identifying some of the innovative companies that can meet those requirements and partner with us to offer an end-to-end solution. Originally, we called it the government UAS vertical, but we recently renamed it to autonomy and robotics to evolve with the technology needs we’ve identified. 

Dawn Zoldi: What other problems were you trying to solve in creating the autonomy and robotics vertical? 

Lacey Wean: There were really two key challenges we identified that we could solve, as a company, particularly with regards to drones. The first and biggest challenge that we saw was that our government customers didn't really know how to buy the right drones. The second was that the drone companies didn’t know how to break into the government market. So partnered with these drone companies and helped them with their go-to-market strategy. Then we leveraged our significant footprint across all agencies using various federal, state and local level contract vehicles to help the agencies procure that tech.  

Dawn Zoldi: How has Carahsoft’s autonomy and robotics vertical evolved? 

Lacey Wean: We initially brought on about 5 partners in this vertical which quickly turned into 10 and turned into 20 and that list continues to grow. We have a number of hardware companies that are manufacturing drones and selling those U.S.-made or TAA compliant drones. We've got partners in the geospatial arena that either do geospatial work or have imagery processing software. We have products for data management and analytics that are integrated with AI/ML functionality. We've got vendors focused on cyber security and keeping the data collected secure. We work with all the major cloud providers that provide workflow solutions while also securely storing the data. We also have a couple of companies that focus on training and enablement to help agencies help ramp new drone programs. Today, we have companies like Airgility, XeoAir, Draganfly and Elsight, to name a few. We also have a number of partnerships in the works which we're really excited to announce in coming months. 

Dawn Zoldi: Can you share with us some of your success stories? 

Lacey Wean: There are so many interesting use cases in this space at all levels of Government. Ultimately, the government focuses on protecting their people, assets and operations and these solutions can help in so many ways. For example, the Department of interior and National Park Service are using these types of products for inspection work on dams and bridges. As I said earlier, we've been in the geospatial sector for a while and have a strong footprint and a lot of customer relationships. We've seen a number of our customers in geospatial that are using some of these products for surveying, mapping, photogrammetry and things along those lines.We've also had success in law enforcement and public safety around security, crime scene investigations and modeling, incident command and control and other things along those lines. In fact, we created a special law enforcement vertical that includes this tech. 

Dawn Zoldi: Tell us more about your law enforcement technology vertical.  

Lacey Wean: While we sell to law enforcement agencies as one of our key government customers, we also have a technology vertical that’s specialized towards law enforcement. Drones are part of that. We also have things such as body-worn cameras, forensics and investigative tools, lighting solutions and other things that law enforcement agencies need. We're continuing to develop these new verticals as new trends emerge. 

Dawn Zoldi: So, in what manner do vendors work with Carahsoft? 

Lacey Wean: Most vendors that we work with view Carahsoft as their master government aggregator, a hybrid between a reseller and a distributor. The reseller model involves the flow from the vendor selling directly to Carahsoft; Carahsoft sells to the customer. In the distribution model, Carahsoft is more in the middle of the transaction, facilitating it and bringing a lot of value to the partnership like a traditional distributor would bring regarding sales and marketing. 

Dawn Zoldi: How do you choose the partners that you work with? 

Lacey Wean: We're always looking for innovative companies and technologies.  Ultimately, we look for companies that are bringing something new to the market that our customers need. We work with both small and large companies and everything in between. There's no company that's too big or too small to work with us. 

Dawn Zoldi: What are the benefits to a company that partners with Carahsoft? 

Lacey Wean: There are 5 key core benefits that offer to all of our partners: 

1. First and foremost, as I mentioned, we're ultimately a sales and marketing company. We put a huge emphasis on sales through our dedicated sales teams to both our large manufacturers and to our specific technology verticals. Our team can become the expert in a vendor’s technology and help act as an extension of that company’s sales team to execute proactive campaigns, white space campaigns, competitive takeout campaigns and provide significant outreach to customers to generate leads. The primary focus of our sales team is really around lead gen and demand gen -  finding qualified opportunities that we can then share with our vendors or share with the reseller ecosystem. 
2. The second capability is our marketing effort. We act as an extension of the vendor’s marketing team. Through our large public sector marketing team, we amplify that message to secure sales. 
3. Carahsoft has a number of contracts in the government space that we can get our partners added to and use as an onramp vehicle. 
4. When we've got an opportunity, we've also got a great reseller ecosystem of a couple thousand partners from systems integrators to cloud providers to fed ramp partners or implementation partners to small business resellers that can help meet those government small business requirements.  
5. Then there's a number of additional resources that we bring to the table from market research and bid board capabilities and our proposals team that can help coordinate a company’s proposal efforts. 

Dawn Zoldi: Do you enable partnering between your various partners? 

Lacey Wean: Yes! We love when our partners can partner together and Carahsoft can help market those joint solutions. There are a couple things that we do to bring those partners together. Our sales team, especially our vertical teams, are cross-trained in multiple products to provide them a solid understanding of that specific vertical so they can help match some of those partners together and facilitate introductions throughout the year. We also host a couple of industry-wide events or partner briefings, both in person and virtually, those typically held with some type of networking event at the end, where the vendors come together and talk to one another and talk about their products and ideas. For example, at the beginning of the year, we do a briefing on the federal budget. We've done some relating to state and local budgets. Dawn, I know you did one for us on the drone market last year. We've done one in the law enforcement space. If you take a look at our website, you'll see that we host a lot of these types of events each year. We are also looking to create additional partner matchmaking events. 

Dawn Zoldi: Tell us about some of the major contract vehicles Carahsoft works with and how it enables vendors to tap into those opportunities. 

Lacey Wean: On the federal side, there are three primary acquisition vehicles, government-wide procurement contracts, to which we have access. To footstomp, there is no guarantee of sales. These provide more of an avenue for customers to buy a vendor’s products in the easiest and most streamlined way that they possibly can:  

1. The GSA schedule, which is tied very closely to the Blue UAS program. Carahsoft holds multiple GSA awards schedules and the GSA MAS (Multiple Award Schedule) contract, to which we have the ability to add drones and the related products. 
2. The NASA SEWP (Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement) contract. We can't add drones to this, but we can add some related software.  
3. The Information Technology Enterprise Solutions – Software 2 (ITES-SW2) contract, is a CHESS (Computer Hardware, Enterprise Software and Solutions) contract managed by the Army. 

All three of these contracts are available to any federal agency to utilize on both defense intelligence. They're available for tribal organizations as well.  

Dawn Zoldi: In which types of state and local government vehicles is Carahsoft involved? 

Lacey Wean: While the federal government manages the GSA schedules, there are a couple of states that have a state-specific GSA schedule. California’s CMAS (California Multiple Award Schedules (CMAS) contract is based off of the federal GSA schedule. I believe New Mexico has something similar as does the city of Seattle and a couple others. So Carahsoft is involved in some state-specific contracts that are based specifically off the GSA schedule. Also on the state and local side, we've got some cooperative purchasing agreements as well. Those are available to any state and local government or education entity that would like to buy through them. The two main ones are NASPO, which is available to about 38 states, and the OMNIA Partners contract, which is available to all state and local governments. They've got pre-negotiated terms incorporated in some of them so it helps shorten the sales cycle a little bit. 

Dawn Zoldi: How does Carahsoft proactively get the word out about vendors? 

Lacey Wean: We have extensive marketing capabilities. Our marketing team is one of the largest public sector focused marketing teams in the industry and we've got teams that are focused specifically on vendor and partner marketing. We do a lot of that through webinars, email campaigns, content syndication, third-party programs where we help negotiate some additional discounts for content and the promotion. We do public relations through our PR team. We've got a great social media team and Carahsoft presence on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and all the major social media platforms. We also do a lot around conference services. We've got a great event space in our office in Reston, Virginia.  Not only do we host a number of events for our partners throughout the year, we also host a ton of events for our customers, from executive briefings to training sessions. Anytime I go into our office, up to the fifth floor, usually both sides are filled with customers and partners who are there for our different events. We also have in-house production capabilities, digital media teams focused on website digital content creation and a trade show team. 

Dawn Zoldi: How do you leverage trade shows to benefit your vendors and other partners? 

Lacey Wean: The trade shows are really exciting for us. If you've been to one of the big trade shows before, you've probably seen us there at our partner pavilion or big Carahsoft booth with a lot of our partners near us. We put blue carpet all around to differentiate the space. We hold demos, do partner presentations, executive briefings, networking receptions all to make a big splash at scale with Carahsoft and all of our partners at these events.  

Dawn Zoldi: Can you list some of the trade shows that Carahsoft chooses to attend? 

Lacey Wean: Absolutely. We kicked off the year with a couple of events such as EDGE23 at CES in January, GeoWeek and AFCEA West in February, Sea-Air-Space in April, GeoINT and SOF Week in May. Also in May, this year, we had a booth at XPONENTIAL 2023 for the first time and supported the Law-Tech Connect Workshop Scholar’s Program for the second year in a row. There were also a number of regional state and locally focused shows as well, such as the ones at the XElevate campus. 

Dawn Zoldi: At what trade shows might we see Carahsoft next? 

Lacey Wean: We plan to have a presence at CommercialUAV in Las Vegas in September, the IACP (International Association of Chiefs of Police conference) in San Diego in October, DODIIS, which is the Defense Intelligence Agency’s technology conference, will be in Portland in the beginning of December. Those are our main three for the rest of this year. 

Dawn Zoldi: Can you give us a preview of what else is next for Carahsoft? 

Lacey Wean: With regards to this autonomy and robotics line of effort, we're in the process of bringing on some more partners, including some really exciting ones that I'm excited to talk about soon. We plan to continue doing a lot of activities with our existing partners in the marketing and brand awareness arena. Besides seeing us at a few more events throughout this year, we're already looking at a great lineup of events for next year. So keep an eye out for us and for our partners.  

Dawn Zoldi: Any closing comments? 

Lacey Wean: It was exciting to talk about Carahsoft!  We're always looking for new innovative solutions and partners that we can ultimately bring to our customers. Follow us on social media and look for us at our booth at some of these events. Visit our website at www.carahsoft.com. Any manufacturers that might be interested in a partnership can fill out a form on the website, under “partners.” That directly connects  to our new vendor onboarding team so they can set up an intro call. Be sure to mention that you heard about us through the Dawn of Drones podcast or this article with AUVSI. You can also reach me directly on LinkedIn or via email.  

Watch Lacey Wean on the Dawn of Drones podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di-H78SN5qg