Already one of the fastest-growing software companies in the D.C. area, ScienceLogic is now looking to deploy its artificial intelligence tools to help what's estimated to be largest civilian information technology spender in the federal government.
The Reston software company, in partnership with McLean-based Swish Data Corp., just secured a five-year, $43 million contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide its artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) tools to help monitor and manage its agencywide cloud efforts.
The contract will have ScienceLogic, a 2021 DC Inno on Fire Award winner, helping the VA migrate to the cloud by assessing its existing software applications, where they might fail and how to mitigate those failures, CEO and founder Dave Link said in a recent interview with the Washington Business Journal.
“One of the big catalysts for this contract was a very strategic initiative within the VA to move more and more of their applications to the cloud,” he said. “Our focus originally is to help them manage those cloud assets more proactively.”
The Reston company, which has been growing its federal contracting business and even toyed with an initial public offering more than once over the years, has been on a tear for the past year. It raised $105 million in February in a round led by Menlo Park, California-based Silver Lake Waterman, nearly doubling its lifetime funding thus far. Even before the VA contract, Link told the Washington Business Journal in January that the company expected to add 150 employees to its cadre of 400 in 2021.
Combining ScienceLogic's AI with Swish's VA experience
Because of the move to the cloud, many of the software tools the VA relies on have to be reconfigured or made compatible to operate across a hybrid environment of cloud and on-premise data centers.
The level of detail and insight needed to monitor those applications and ensure they are running properly is immense. ScienceLogic does that by automating the process with its artificial intelligence operations tools, which monitor the software on the VA’s networks and report any anomalies that may arise, Link said.
“So we’re looking at all of that in real time to give the VA a real-time view into how service quality is performing against those applications,” Link said.
Swish, a service-disabled-veteran-owned and HUBZone-certified small business provider with a deep history with the VA, provides the engineers, and strategy and expertise to help actually implement the contract.
“The VA is the second-largest digital spend in the government — it has over 650,000 endpoints,” Swish CEO Monty Deel said. “As they go to the cloud, the need for AIOps is actually expedited in itself. Just going from [on-premise] to cloud creates all kinds of new dynamics.”
Covid accelerates ScienceLogic's growth
There’s little room for error. Deel said that it’s been estimated that a one-hour outage of technology services “cost something between $10 million to $15 million to the government,” which means keeping those services running is a high priority.
Deel said like everything in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, there's greater demand for more remote-enabled AI technology like that of ScienceLogic. That's particularly the case with the VA when it pivoted to telehealth visits during the height of the pandemic.
“Transformation is happening faster,” Link said. “Rebuilding [applications] so they can run natively in the cloud, ... you start realizing that the tools you were using [on site], they need a refresh themselves. That’s been a great catalyst for the ScienceLogic business over the past year.”
