Government's new postattack IT needs spell opportunity

IDG News Service - After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. government is more dependent than ever on the private sector to provide key technologies that can be used to secure and defend the country, offering opportunities for IT companies that can cater to the government's needs, according to experts on a homeland security panel.

While the U.S. government has long been one of the largest consumers of IT in the world, there's greater emphasis today on deploying products and services to share crucial information and to plug the nation's security holes that were exposed by the terrorist attacks.

"Never before have I had congressmen and congresswomen asking me what technology is available," said Phil Whitebloom, vice president of government sales at Park Ridge, N.J.-based Sony Electronics Inc. Whitebloom spoke at a conference today titled Homeland Security, Technology and the Role of the Government. The session was organized by Washington-based Potomac Tech Wire.

In high demand are technologies such as biometrics, which is used to authenticate a person's identity by matching fingerprint, retina or facial scans to those stored in databases, and infrastructure products that help government organizations share information quickly and securely, panelists said.

Over the longer term, government groups that expand operations outside their traditional hubs will find that redundancy technology that ensures network performance and information integrity is increasingly important, said Howard Vine, a lobbyist at Miami-based law firm Greenberg Traurig LLP, which sponsored the conference.

A significant increase in defense spending, also spurred by the terrorist attacks, is another reason more government dollars will be devoted to IT.

"That [increased defense spending] is going to have an enormous impact on the economy. A lot of the money will end up being spent on information technology through outsourcing" to private companies, said Harvey Sherzer, an attorney also at Greenberg Traurig.

New opportunities aren't open to just U.S. IT companies. Japan's Sony Corp., for example, supplies the U.S. government with technologies such as digital audio recording equipment and videoconferencing systems, according to Whitebloom.

Another panelist, In-Q-Tel Inc.'s director of technology assessment, Kimberly Cook, said her company invests in both foreign and domestic start-ups. Arlington, Va.-based In-Q-Tel is a venture capital company that was established in 1999 by the Central Intelligence Agency to fund early-stage companies building technology in which the agency is interested.

While the panelists agreed that opportunities to sell to the government are there, they also said taking advantage of the opportunities can be difficult.

For example, companies looking to sell security and data-exchange products to the government would