Executive Mosaic is honored to announce Carahsoft Technology President Craig Abod as a recipient of the 2022 Wash100 Award. This marks his eighth Wash100 win in the nine-year history of Executive Mosaic’s annual selection of leaders who shape the government contracting landscape.
“Being included among so many esteemed Government and Information Technology industry leaders for the past eight years is certainly an honor that I share with the vendor and reseller partners that we support and with whole the Carahsoft team,” Abod said in February 2022. Visit Wash100.com to cast a vote for him and advocate for your other favorite leaders in the GovCon community.
For nearly two decades, Abod and Carahsoft have been working to streamline information technology acquisition processes for government customers and IT vendors.
One of Carahsoft’s initiatives to facilitate IT procurement is the Cloud Purchasing Program, which the company unveiled in 2020. Through CPP, government clients can procure cloud products and services from over 90 vendors through a single stock keeping unit. With CPP, federal agencies can buy cloud offerings through the General Services Administration’s Multiple Award Schedule contract, NASA’s Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement governmentwide acquisition contract and the U.S. Army’s Information Technology Enterprise Solutions – Software 2 contract.
In July 2021, Carahsoft added 95 software vendors to its ITES-SW2 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract to further support the U.S. Army’s enterprise infrastructure initiatives.
Through the acquisition vehicle, the Army, the Department of Defense, federal agencies and systems integrators can order from audio and visual, modeling and simulation, network operations, operating systems and 11 other product catalogs.
“Our expanding portfolio of solutions allows us to better meet the needs of our defense and civilian customers across the federal government,” Abod said at the time.
In February 2021, Carahsoft secured a second blanket purchase agreement under DOD’s Enterprise Software Initiative to provide government, defense and intelligence community customers with access to key software and IT offerings.
Six months later, the company added five more providers under the ESI BPA, expanding the military’s access to cybersecurity and IT asset management offerings.
“We look forward to continuing to build momentum around these BPAs to better serve our defense customers with software and services from our solution providers and reseller partners,” Abod said.
Carahsoft entered into several agreements in 2021 to help multiple tech companies bring their platforms and services to the public sector. In June, the company agreed to distribute NightDragon’s portfolio of cyber products across local, state and federal governments and educational institutions.
In September 2021, Carahsoft announced the availability of Zoom’s video communications software-as-a-service offerings on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace for federal, state and local governments.
“We are now able to offer an additional, more simplified method of procuring Zoom’s SaaS solutions to our Public Sector customers,” Abod said.
In addition to efforts of bridging tech vendors to the government market, Carahsoft released a report in May 2021 that examined the citizen experience with federal government services during the pandemic.
Carahsoft commissioned market research firm Merit to survey 2,312 individuals between October 2020 and November 2020 and found that 53 percent of respondents experienced about the same quality of services before and after the onset of the pandemic. The report showed that 39 percent of surveyed citizens commented that there is a lack of improvement in customer experiences.
“This report highlights just how difficult it is to move the needle on citizen experience, but at the same time there are some bright spots,” Abod said of the report.
The study found that nearly 80 percent of citizens said they were somewhat or very likely to offer feedback to agencies if they had a poor experience.
“Respondents have indicated that they are comfortable engaging with Government to provide feedback, and they are looking for Government to deploy the next-generation CX technology that offers both improved self-service functionality and security, similar to the experience offered by the private sector,” Abod added.
Executive Mosaic extends its congratulations to Abod and the rest of the Carahsoft organization.
