“Providing End-to-end Solutions”

During this protracted quarantine period, COVID companies face challenges related to leveraging IT resources to accommodate a spike in telework. They can be divided into four categories: communications bandwidth; leveraging cloud-based collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams, WebEx, Zoom, etc.; cybersecurity; and integration with mobile devices. TekSynap has broad experience in all of these areas, including partnerships and working relationships with CSPs, specifically Microsoft (Azure) and Amazon (AWS), and mobility vendors, such as Cisco for Wi-Fi infrastructure services. “Our experience, combined with these relationships, have allowed us to provide rapid response and end-to-end solutions to meet agency needs,” says Senior Vice President, Raymond Caruso of TekSynap.

TekSynap was founded in 2008, and the founders have worked together for over a decade, supporting customers ranging from small departmental operations and maintenance efforts to leading large nationwide deployment efforts for agencies such as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. TekSynap’s core management team has operated in leading companies, such as SIGNAL Corporation, and managed business sectors of over $100M in annual revenue in industry-leading companies, such as General Dynamics.

"As we entered into 2021, TekSynap crossed the small business threshold and entered into the world of competing in full and open large business opportunities"

From inception, one of TekSynap’s most pivotal initiatives has been ensuring that they operate as a process-focused company to include infrastructure that would expand as the company grew. To grow from a small business and move toward the full and open large business world meant that TekSynap needed to ensure that its foundation was built around predictable and repeatable processes. By rooting their organization in industry best-in-class processes and ingraining those processes' value into their managers and technical staff, they enabled the ability to scale up to meet large contracts.

“TekSynap uses a multi-pronged approach and a variety of tools to stay out in front of our competition. First, we work to proactively tackle opportunities by conducting capture activities prior to solicitations being advertised,” says Raymond Caruso. “Maintaining constant awareness of what contracts are expiring in a 12-to-18-month timeframe allows us to conduct intelligence activities, collect information, and prepare well in advance for an RFP.” He adds, “whenever possible, we reach out to government operations staff and/or contracting shops to obtain any intelligence on incumbent performance, hot-button issues, or strategic objectives of an organization.”

TekSynap has made a strategic, significant investment in hiring personnel with experience and skillsets in advanced emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Cloud, Collaboration, and mobility. “These key additions to our staff have paid dividends in our ability to work with existing customers in areas that will vastly improve their IT investments, as well as strengthen the business operations supporting their respective missions,” adds Raymond Caruso.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, TekSynap provided the architectural and technical support to transition the NRC’s workforce to nearly a 100 percent telework environment. During the transition, TekSynap designed and implemented the expansion of the NRC’s internet circuits and routing to accommodate the additional Citrix VPN and VDI remote access users. They also identified and resolved issues with the VPN platform, which resulted in the vendor implementing a customer-wide change and migrated the agency from on-premises Skype to off-premises Microsoft SaaS application, Teams, to name a few. The NRC’s CIO, David Nelson, stated, “I think our highest number of VPN users prior to this was 600 concurrent users, in situations like weather closings. But now we are regularly seeing 2,800 concurrent VPN users. We can also securely log into Microsoft 365 from our mobile devices. That allows us to use the portal to access email or material saved on cloud drives, without coming through the VPN.”

“As we entered into 2021, TekSynap crossed the small business threshold and entered into the world of competing in full and open large business opportunities,” says Raymond Caruso. While much of TekSynap’s business development has been spread across the company, executive leadership has also made a key decision to bring in a Chief Growth Officer (CGO) at the corporate level and allocated funding to build a corporate business development capability to pursue larger long-range opportunities. “While business development will still be driven at all levels of the company, this corporate-focused capability provides an added resource essential for future growth in the broader competitive landscape.” IE