The Challenges and Benefits of Seeking Government Contracts for Specialized AV Work with Chris Hagewood, Jonathon Reany and Richard Winters

Published: June 17, 2020, 4:07 p.m.

It’s frustrating when your systems go down, but when you’re the United States Department of Defense, a hardware issue could literally be a matter of life and death.

So, it’s understandable the DOD would have extremely high standards for the products it uses. Vendors have to be sure they’re able to do exactly what they say they can and make sure the products work.

Diversified specializes in building operations centers for mission-critical environments, so it knew what it would take on when it started working on projects with the federal government.

“Those projects were built in such a way where they have zero down time for the most part,” said Richard Winters, Senior Design Engineer. “Something fails here or there, but they have not had a catastrophic failure that causes any kind of vulnerability to the United States. We paid a lot of attention to uptime or MTBF – mean time before failure.”

After impressing out of the gate, Diversified now works with the national government so often it has a dedicated department, the Federal Solutions Group. The group makes sure the technical specifications right and that the relationships are in place for the company to land the highly competitive contracts.

“If you look at our business, it’s very technical, but there’s also the contractual side of the business, especially in the federal government arena,” said Jonathon Reany, Senior Vice President for the Federal Solutions Group. “That is a very difficult part of getting contracts, and over the years, we’ve established relationships with small businesses that have contract vehicles and we’ve established relationships with large businesses that have contract vehicles, so we’re able to utilize just about any of the contract vehicles the Department of Defense and federal government agencies use through our partnerships.”

Between getting the gig and doing it right, Diversified continues to push into new frontiers, already thinking about how their products will change in a socially distant world after the coronavirus pandemic and making sure their customers get a product that works – all the time.