It's about the money, DHS CIO says

Richard Spires, chief information officer of the Homeland Security Department, has no illusions about why so many people turned out to hear him speak at Input’s Federal Executive Breakfast on Oct. 5 in Tysons Corner, VA.

“Wonderful turn out,” Spires said to the roomful of contractors and systems integrators as he took the podium after his introduction by Raj Ananthanpillai, CEO and president of InfoZen.

“People were saying it’s about you,” he said. “I said, ‘No it’s about the money.’”

Indeed, DHS, which has a $6.4 billion IT budget, is in the midst of an IT infrastructure development and modernization initiative.

The DHS market for the contractor addressable market will grow from $6 billion to $8 billion with a compound annual growth rate of 5.50 percent over the next five years, said John Slye, principal analyst with Input.

Contractors that offer products and services for control and oversight, disaster recovery, homeland security, IT management and law enforcement – which account for 90 percent of DHS’s IT budget – are in a sweet spot, Slye said.