Tech is more than an industry; it’s a national security prerogative. So, why is the sector’s federal procurement system—how the government works with outside sources to acquire goods and services—stuck in the past?

That’s a question Steven Aberle, CEO and founder of Rohirrim, has been asking himself lately. Rohirrim is a procurement and request for proposal (RFP) solutions AI company and Aberle a former government contractor.

His RohanProcure product was created after government officials reached out to bring the commercial side of automation to the federal side. It’s all in service of faster procurement, Aberle told IT Brew, which he believes is “a national security imperative.”

“Procurement speed is not an administrative convenience anymore,” Aberle said. “It needs to be a core element of deterrence.”

Why procurement is more important than ever.—EH

New SVP of Product Ecosystems and Partners at Databricks Stephen Orban said that he admires how technical the company is and the vision it has for democratizing data and artificial intelligence for all.

“Generative AI over the last couple of years is not just a CIO-level concern, that’s a CEO- and boardroom-level concern,” Orban told IT Brew. “Every company I’ve talked to in the last two years is trying to figure out what AI means for their business, and many of them are turning to Databricks to help them break down those silos and use the analytics and AI on top of data that’s unified across their teams.”

That’s part of the reason he joined the early-stage data intelligence platform after time at Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services. During his time at AWS, Orban launched AWS Data Exchange, which offers data from hundreds of providers.

He sat down with IT Brew to share why he made the decision to join Databricks, and what he’d like to do now.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Something on people’s minds in both the public and private sector is the importance of breaking down data silos. Can we talk about how, in your position, you want to prioritize that? How could it potentially make for a streamlined process for IT professionals?

Step one is to get the data in. So, connect, whether it be with a partner ecosystem or with various capabilities that we have, and then we have partnerships with all those SaaS companies that we have to connect to, like a Salesforce to help get that data in. So, that’s one way we’re working to break down the data silos.

Here’s what Orban thinks about AI.—CN

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