Jeskell is a nearly 20-year old IBM hardware and software reseller that also develops and sells solutions in the federal marketplace. In fact, 70 percent of its business is federal. In an interview for theCUBE held at IBM Edge last month, Jeskell’s VP of Business Development, Bill Jones, talked to Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick about what the tech business is like in the federal arena.

Strength in an Economic Downturn

When the economy turned for the worst, Jones said that business “certainly chugged along,” but didn’t actually turn down. Even though there are budget battles every year, the government always spends a fair amount of money and, when times get it tight, it tries to spend more. So business at Jeskell has been strong.

The company has experienced year-to-year growth for three of the last four years, with growth also anticipated for this year as well. “The government puts money in when no one else is investing to keep the economy rolling,” Jones added.

• Government Clients and the Cloud

Jones said that customers are pulling back on public cloud, but have some interest in the private cloud. He expects to see a continued move to private clouds, as he’s seen a few large, private procurements this past year. Jones also stated that, overall, most customers are not deploying cloud as of now. Rather, their focus is on getting cloud-enabled.

Frick then asked about how customers start getting cloud-enabled. Jones said customers, first and foremost, want to virtualize. They believe if their applications and infrastructure are virtualized, they can then deploy into a virtualized cloud setting.

However, people today have large databases on proprietary architectures and are concerned about having to leave a proprietary hardware base in order to move into a virtualized, cloud-based environment. So software virtualization is the next big step that customers consider. Some are starting to deploy software virtualization while others are still paying lip service, but they are getting there nonetheless. “The government’s not the fastest at transition, but they are moving,” said Jones.

Vexed Government Initiatives

Vellante then brought up the recent hype around government initiatives, mentioning the sequester, NSA and the Affordable Care Act as examples. He asked Jones how much of this is real versus hype.

Jones responded saying that the IT community just kept moving on. As he put it, “the boat didn’t rock and nothing got knocked off the ship.” Although there was a lot of noise around these topics, there really wasn’t any disruption.

As for Jeskell, the company wasn’t at all affected. Jones admitted that the sequesters were a little concerning, but didn’t last forever. He seemed rather composed in his response over vexed government initiatives like these mentioned — so long as they move on and aren’t lengthy events, there shouldn’t be cause for concern.