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GovDiscovery AI Podcast with Mike Shanley
Ep 79 Victor Vigliotti, Director, U.S. Space Force Front Door
00:36:27
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Gov Discovery AI podcast. I'm your host, Mike Shanley. Our guest today, Victor Vigliotti, Director of Space Force Front Door Commercial Space Office Space Systems Command. Vic is the director of the Space Force Front Door, the primary gateway for commercial industry and international partners to engage with U.S. space Force. Under his leadership, the initiative transitioned from a Space Systems Command specific portal to a service wide concierge for the entire Space Force including Space Operations Command and Space Training and Readiness Command. Vic, great to have you on the podcast today. Thank you for taking some time to talk with us.
- [00:39]
B
Absolutely no, happy to be here Mike. Thanks.
- [00:42]
A
So let's jump right in in a place we might not think of starting with knowledge management. What is the state of knowledge management within dow? How is that relevant to our conversation today?
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B
Now this is a great question and it's actually at the crux of everything that we're doing within the Space Force Front Door right now. I'll say that when it came to getting after General Gutline's tenets of exploiting what we have, buying what we can, and really only building what we must, the Front Door team, we really saw that we needed to evaluate what are the current processes across the government, try to identify how we can quickly get after acquiring and purchasing and being able to field commercial capabilities across the board in support of the space warfare architecture. And as we were going from organization to organization and surveying and understanding processes and really trying to see how everybody's currently doing business with the commercial enterprise, we saw that the shortfalls were really within the knowledge management realm. And with regard to a lack of transparency between these organizations with regard to how they're actually managing their information internally and how they're sharing that with others. So we saw that just about everybody across the board on the government side of the house, they were using legacy tools for knowledge management, things like Excel spreadsheets, you know, Microsoft Office tools, things like WordPad, you know, Notepad, their Outlook email inboxes, and all that information was just getting stuck within their own internal shared drives, within, even in on, you know, singular desktops, for example. And we saw that that information, it was limiting our ability to share it with one another, to really understand the commercial enterprise, understand our relationships with the commercial enterprise. And it was, we saw a lot of shortfalls with regard, you know, what we call PCs, ETS, change of position, retirement amnesia across the board. So say you're a commercial vendor, you reach out to one specific organization in the federal government, we saw that they were oftentimes tracking that on Excel Spreadsheets, Microsoft Teams, things like that, not sharing it with anyone, changing positions, going to new organizations. And that data was getting lost across the board. So now that vendor comes back, he returns to someone else within that organization and they say we don't know you, we've never heard of you and we don't know where we were doing business with you and where we are heading. So we saw that at the Space Force front door we needed to develop a solution to that broken knowledge management system. And we started surveying not just the government side of the house, but the commercial side of the house as well. We saw that when we were looking across all those extremely profitable, highly efficient Fortune 500 companies that over 90% of them were actually using Salesforce customer relationship management systems to be able to manage their relationships, manage their knowledge databases and really understand their interactions with vendors, customers, clients, you name it. Across the board we saw that some of the biggest companies around the world were using this exact system. And we also saw it as an immediate opportunity to integrate a commercial capability that was available off the shelf today into what we were doing to better get after that knowledge management problem. So in September of 2023 and the front door team, we stood up and we launched our Salesforce customer relationship management system that allows vendors to, to a single one stop shop to submit their capabilities. And we see the benefit of the system as not just being a database, but being a way that we can manage relationships with those vendors and really understand those relationships from inception and throughout the entirety of that relationship. So it really helps us get after that broken knowledge management issue there.
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A
Great. And it sounds like a very worthwhile and well aligned initiative. Often as we support clients working with, with, with defense will, they'll, they'll say oh no, they know us like it's fine if you know if we're the right fit, they're going to know. I'm like maybe one person knows you. I wouldn't even, you know, assume they're going to remember you like to find some way to capture those capabilities, store them and have it not just be tied to one individual relationship. As important as those are to starting that relationship, to starting that conversation, I think that's great. So let's let, let's get into the next step. How do you all then match those capabilities to the demand signals, to the needs within Space Force?
- [05:13]
B
Now that's a great question as well say that those needs come to us across the Space Force community and not just in the Space Force, the combat command side of the house and all of our connected partners in the back end system. What we do is we work with those partners as we onboard them into the front door construct or the, the front door process as we refer to it, and we kind of dissect those requirements, those needs, as much as we can, so that when those incoming capabilities come through, we can kind of work as switchboard operators to connect capabilities to needs or to those stakeholders. And we see that vendors, oftentimes, they think that someone might be the most appropriate stakeholder for them to sell their capabilities to. Or, you know, a lot of just about everyone across the board who comes to Space Systems Command, for example, they all want to talk directly to General Gurant. They think that he's going to be the most effective person to help them insert their capability or field their capability. But oftentimes he's not the most appropriate stakeholder. You never know who it might be. It could be some major, some lieutenant colonel across the PAEs in space systems Command who actually have the acquisition authority and actually own the requirement and the need to be able to acquire that capability. So what we do is we work within the front door team to onboard those different organizations into the back end system. And as those capabilities come through, we then go in and we kind of matchmake and we connect to the most appropriate stakeholder. And you're absolutely right, when it comes to relationships, it's not necessarily about the individual. I always like to say that, you know, that individual that you might have had a relationship with as a company, you know, they might have already retired and joined the board of directors for your competitor out there. So you want to, you want to have relationships with organizations and have relationships that are enduring and lasting. And as we, as we kind of build out this system a little more, we see that the more organizations that we get into the back end system, the more we can enhance visibility into these commercial offerings and increase that demand signal. Because, you know, you think about maybe, maybe yesterday, the most appropriate stakeholder was one of the specific PAEs within space systems Command. And some of these companies were tied pretty closely to them. But as time progresses, maybe the most appropriate stakeholder or the largest demand signal is going to be in a whole new organization. Maybe it won't even be in the war department at all. Maybe it'll be in the intel community or the civil side of space. So what we need to do is we need to connect all of these disparate organizations into one singular system so that we can increase that demand signal and help offer more visibility into those capabilities across the board and especially as
- [07:42]
A
from year to year, the priorities and budget is, there's looks like there may be at least signals our increased budget for 2027. We'll see how everything plays out. But just that much more important, Vic, how does this work from the government side internally at at Space Force? When there's a demand, when there's a need, when there's a requirement, how do they approach you? I think that's really helpful for industry to understand. How are you having these internal conversations to really shape how they either approach you or their other contacts at Space Force?
- [08:14]
B
Well, gosh, I'd say that it varies from organization to organization. You know, some of them come to us directly and say here's, here's our requirements, help us find these capabilities and then we can then go and kind of scour through system. But what we're trying to posture the federal government to do is to get into the system themselves. We don't want to be in a reactive state. We want to be in a proactive posture as much as possible. So when organizations identify needs, when they generate requirements, what we're trying to kind of shape and condition the federal government to do is to get access to this system, start proactively targeting those capabilities that meet their needs, potentially meet those requirements and potentially fill those gaps and proactively reach out to those vendors themselves so that we can shift away from what we see as numerous or organizations out there just fully underwater and drowning from just the endless onslaught of commercial companies that are constantly trying to submit and communicate with them. And then what happens is we have a government organization that is so busy generating read ahead materials, prep materials, all these different things in support of just having an engagement or a discussion with a company that another organization might have already had and we don't know about it because of that broken knowledge management system. And so if we can combine all this data into one singular system now, we can stop duplicating repetitive actions across the government. We can posture ourselves to be a little more proactive on how we go after commercial capabilities and we can get after those demand signals without having to ask companies to submit to us. What I envision is that one stop shop where vendors just know as they build their LLCs, as they build their companies, one of the first steps is that they're going to submit and share their information with us. We'll have them within that database, within that catalog, and we'll be able to start managing those relationships early. And then as the government demand signal builds, the government can proactively go into the system, identify that capability that fits their needs potentially and proactively ping that company, reach out to them and start that engagement collaboration process that way. But we do see that those organizations are pretty, pretty underwater with regard to the amount of vendors coming out. We are trying to find ways to reduce the burden of things like generating engagement prep materials and so forth. And we're developing quite a bit of automations in the system to get after that. We have a pretty incredible breakthrough currently with regard to Microsoft integration of the system to integrate into existing workflows in the government and allow them to generate those read ahead materials, those quad charts automatically so that we can stop the staff churn that continuously goes on across the government and creating non stop prep materials and quad charts on the same vendors every week.
- [10:50]
A
And I think I'd like to get into that a little bit more. How does that internal matchmaking take place? What's the human role in that? What's the. Are you using AI for any of that? Is it direct keyword matching against the requirements? Are you able to even generate, I don't know, maybe zero draft RFIs too based on, you know, here's the sampling of. There are five US small businesses that have this capabilities. Okay, we can release an RFI and maybe do a set aside. I'm getting a little ahead of it there. But how does that internal matchmaking happen and what is that human role? What's the technology? Because it sounds exciting what you guys are doing with the technology side.
- [11:28]
B
Absolutely. And we, we are not seeking to supplant any of the traditional acquisitions processes, the contracting actions, anything like that in any way. We're not trying to really generate the market research process and things like that through this system. We want to ensure that we're just providing decision makers, acquirers and operators with the most data available to better inform them when making decisions and when going after different things and when targeting things when working towards their requirements. But with regard to the capability, the automations, the system development. Right. Currently it's pretty heavily human in the loop right now. It's pretty heavily manual process. We do have a team of that kind of help through the process depending on the technology readiness level, the capabilities that are coming our way. We're focused between a nurturing pathway for those innovative lower TRL companies versus a fielding pathway that would get after different pathways for those higher TRL type companies out there. But right now we do have a team of programmers on staff that are working away as we speak to generate and to Develop automations in the system to take the humans out of the loop as much as possible and only if needed to be able to get after that matchmaking instantaneously. So right now we it's about a few hour process per company that submits to us to really understand where it needs to go. But we're looking to reduce that timeline over the next three to six months maximum to have just instantaneous matchmaking through AI ML integration into the system. We are working with our federally funded research and development center, partners at Aerospace to develop out some automations for the system through one of the initiatives. With them we are integrating AI ML to validate capabilities against existing government requirements. Whether that's leveraging key terms, things like that. We are working to train the models today against some of those government requirements so that again, as vendors submit to the front door system, those capabilities can get automatically validated against the requirements and the matchmaking will happen in real time. And on top of that, a huge part of that initiative in automating our process for validation and validating data is going to be included through some API and data connections with some existing government systems out there, including the Office of Commercial and economic analysis or OCA's craft tool that they're leveraging. So a lot of government organizations out there are very familiar with CRAFT that are doing amazing things out there. And we're working to take that data and to be able to integrate it into the system to better populate versus what the vendors themselves are sending us. Because generally in the front door system, the starting point of information comes from the vendors, comes from the commercial enterprise. And the initial set of data that we're getting is being integrated from the vendors. And then what we're doing is we're going in to validate that data against what we're already aware of through existing databases, publicly available sources, things like that. But those automations between the next three to six months when we launch and go live, are going to include integration of all those data sources combined to better populate, better matchmake and just get after instantaneous processes.
- [14:31]
A
All right Vic, so you're the, let's say you're the CEO of one of these defense tech companies coming out of Boulder or Austin or Silicon Valley. What do you recommend from the business development side, from the client engagement side, for reaching out to Space Force? Go to your website. They're probably also at conferences or have other contacts or relationships they're building, maybe through, you know, a retired general on their board or on their advisory committee. Talk me through if you're in that position. What role does front door play in their overall procurement process? But obviously there's not just one point you put your capabilities in.
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B
Great.
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A
A contract shows up, doesn't really work that way. You got to piece together the relationships. Do you know the, the hustle on your, on your own as well, matching your capabilities to the requirements. From your perspective, what role. Yeah. Where does front door fit in and what are some of the other things you would think about that are going to be important, supplementing that capabilities and that relationship with you and your team?
- [15:31]
B
Well, gosh, I'd say the role that we play, it just, it depends on the vendors out there. I'd say if you're a major prime company out there, you might not get the same level of satisfaction from submitting to the front door because you do have those retired general officers as retired colonels on your, on your board, on your staff who have the, those large Rolodexes and connections to be able to connect you to the right people. But for those more non traditional, smaller innovative startups out there, we found a lot of value in helping walk them through the process because the, you know, the org charts in the government and the labyrinth of government acquisitions is quite complex and it's very difficult to understand the constant changes and constant transitions in organizational structures. We find that that's very difficult even on the government side to keep track of. And so we fully, you know, expect vendors to be confused in the sense of who do I talk to and who's who in the zoo in the government. And we don't necessarily believe that that should be their responsibility to understand when we struggle to understand it ourselves in the government. So we do try to match make, we do try to find those connections and answer those questions. We do see that the front door has been a resource for government as well. From that perspective. We get government inquiries all the time through our front door system asking hey, who's the peo pae for so and so. And we can answer those questions pretty quickly through a ticketed CRM system. But we do see a value in say you're a CEO or and you're looking to enhance visibility into your capabilities and you're looking to potentially open the doors to more, more funding pathways as we refer to them. So we are in the business of identifying funding pathways depending on whether you have a capability ready for fielding capability ready for the innovation cycles. And we're trying to compile together all the potential fielding pathways and provide that information to those vendors and Say, have you thought of this? Have you thought of that? That or sometimes vendors aren't going to be as happy when we say, you know what, you're doing all the right things and keep doing what you're doing right and we're going to keep your information in our system and if there's a demand signal in the future, we'll, we'll make sure that they reach out to you as soon as possible. But we do see that there are a lot of vendors that come to us and they are doing everything the right way. They, they are talking to all the right organizations, they're working through all the, the most appropriate innovations or fielding pathways out there. And it's just a matter of keep up the good work, you know, you're doing the right things. And it's, it's not always the answer they want. I will say from an expectation level set perspective, we, we do seem to have a pretty heavy expectation out there that if you come through the front door at the end of the, at the, at the opposite side of that room that they enter, there's going to be a multimillion dollar contract awaiting. But we are not, we do not have acquisition authority in the front door. We are not handing out contracts and we are not handing out funding. We're going to try to connect you to those who can and it's kind of on you to sell yourself. Right. If we set you up with a date, we find you a match, then it's going to be on those different organizations, different vendors out there to sell their wares and to hopefully get a call back for a second date.
- [18:25]
A
Absolutely. And I think that's great to know what is that role? And that is such an important role, especially for maybe some of those firms newer to the defense market, to have someone to help amplify their capabilities and set up some of those relationships. Can you share a story of how is this when this works? What's a case study of how of a time that there has been a successful engagement with front door?
- [18:53]
B
No, absolutely. I always like to push back to one of our higher visibility success stories. I know Little Place Labs companies came to us a few years back and we helped kind of walk them through the process, help navigate them to some appropriate stakeholders, things like that. And I know a Wall Street Journal article came out with them included plug in the front door process and how helpful it was for them to identify those stakeholders, identify those funding pathways and they found quite a bit of success with their capabilities. And we do see that when it comes to those innovation cycles when it comes to those TACFI, StrapFi, SBIR, CIDR Phase 1, 2, 3, you know, SpaceWorks programs, DIU type programs and initiatives out there, we have seen quite a downpour of vendors come to us through just about every solicitation cycle. And what we help to do is try to find stakeholders for potential signatures to be able to support those capabilities through those CBER solicitations. We have seen quite a bit of vendors come through the front door and ultimately end up with, you know, awarded on The Cibber Cycle, CIDR Cycle, those SpaceWorks challenges out there. And that seems to be one of the biggest value propositions that we, we provide to those small companies is helping them find matches, helping them find those letters of support and helping them find those organizations that are most interested in supporting the siber citr tact by stratify cycles out there. So I'd say from a success perspective, we have, I'd say provided and handed off what we call, you know, over, gosh, $120 million worth of potential funding pathways to some of these vendors. It's not direct lines of funding that have been acquired or delivered or fielded, but what we see is that across all of the requests that we've received in the system for funding from all the vendors that have come through, it's been between 1 and $200 million in requests coming through our way. So a lot of, a lot of potential funding flowing through the number of awardees of all of that money. Now that's hard to decipher. The problem with being able to decipher that is our difficulties in closing the loop with the organizations that we hand off to. And that is we, we, we like to say everything is a process and front door problems, but oftentimes we struggle to get the feedback from the organizations, post handoff and as they exit the front door process. And we do see that on the commercial side of the house, there's frustrations with that too because, you know, they're talking to these different stakeholders, these different mission areas and when we don't get that information back from those mission areas, back from the vendors on what actually happened after we set you up on that date, where did it go? As if we can't compile that data, it makes it more and more difficult to define the metrics on what's happening, what is creating this valley of death and what's continuing the growth of it and how can we support that and how can we more effectively get after mitigating those problems?
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A
And Vic I'd say if that was one of our clients, we would also encourage them to maintain the relationship because maybe there's a Wall Street Journal article that can get written about you and your company as a success story or maybe it's just great to, it's rather than having it just one off and moving on. And I totally get it, you're wrapped up in the contract, you have startup but, but the importance of maintaining, coming back, closing that loop and that just reinforces that relationship. Quick follow up there. You mentioned Little Place Labs in that Wall Street Journal article. Was there anything unique that they did or were they just like you said, one of those other firms that was just doing the right thing and they just stuck with it until the capabilities met the opportunity?
- [22:24]
B
I'd say that they stuck with it. They were doing the right things, they had an excellent capability. They were very motivated to continue through the process and to engage with those, those different mission owners and to share those capabilities and do everything that they could to keep themselves kind of inserted into that process of understanding. And they were, they were very communicative with the Front Door team as well. And they were, they were just very open to, to taking our advice, our recommendations and kind of moving forward in those directions. And I think that's, that's one of the benefits of it is when we do get new capabilities, new ideas, new concepts from these vendors, we want them to come back to us, we want them to share that with us so we can update the system and re notify all those same organizations, all those same part partners in the backend system to say, hey, have you thought about this yet? Are you aware of this capability and kind of provide almost newsletters across those government partners to ensure that they're aware of these capabilities, they're aware of these updates. So I think that's, they did all the right things at Little Place Labs and they continued to press and they were very motivated to push forward and very communicative with the Front Door.
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A
So you got into this a little bit already, but what's next? What can we expect over the next year from Front Door? What are you and the team working on?
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B
On awesome. That's a great question too. And that's probably the most exciting thing to me right now. I think we're doing a lot of system development efforts right now. We're moving through that Agile process pretty quickly now that we have a solid team of programmers internally. That was one of the difficulties of the Front Door system since its inception. We initially used a software factory to develop out the system but didn't have our own internal developers to maintain the development cycles and to continue the production and continue the development outwardly through our different milestones and pathways. And we finally got our initial programmer on staff at the end of 2024 account set up early 2025. So we've been slowly working through 2025 with a single programmer to get after solving world hunger. But now we finally got staffed up to have numerous pretty high level programmers on the team to get after these milestones pretty quickly. And for a lot of our milestones we're looking at finalizing them in 2026. We have a lot of exciting initiatives that we're building out right now, including the automation pieces generating automated quad charts Read ahead Materials prep materials for senior leaders and in support of those industry engagements that are going on across the government. We have the automations for validating capabilities and matchmaking to take things down from days and hours to seconds and minutes and seconds throughout the process. So those are all coming by mid-2026 that we're looking to launch. We have some initiatives with regard to graphical user interface or GUI updates and UI UX updates to the system that are specifically when I talk about these system updates, these are specifically focused on the government side of the house. These are benefits and kind of value and new technologies for the government to leverage and those partnered users across the board, we're working to integrate this directly into Microsoft Tools. Today we're working to ensure that everybody across the government who wants access to the front door system can just go right on their Microsoft Teams, open up the little front door icon and app and access that company data as needed, be able to pull information, brief it to their senior leaders and start doing things live with real time data as opposed to static PowerPoint slides. So those are some of the big things coming up this year for the government side of the house that we're super excited about. Some of the things that we're working towards for commercial this year is working to create ways for vendors to have almost profiles that similar to like an account you'd have on Facebook, on whatever app or social media or whatever app you're using or account that you're using and go in and be able to just update that account, change maybe names, add phone numbers, add Read ahead materials. Right now the way that the system is working is that vendors when they submit to us to add new data, they have to go and submit again, right? It's going to match that to their existing company profile from a backend system processing perspective. But we also, we don't want vendors to have to go and resubmit all over again for a new capability. We want them to be able to just go in, log into their profile, update some stuff and then they'll be able to see something that they've shared with us. And then on the back end we'll be able to see that government, you know, controlled unclassified information that we might have overlaid into that data. So we'll have two kind of separate instances. We're looking to build out that government or that commercial portal for updating and then that government portal for a little more user friendly access for the government. But what that's going to help us learn and help us enable on the commercial side as we identify better ways for vendors to go in and update profiles and add and access information as needed. It's going to help us understand what's needed for what we're targeting at early 2027, which is our Orbital Watch portal for vendors to access and share unclassified threat information with us to be able to better get after threat information sharing and for all those listeners out there and for your SAR Orbital Watch initiative is our front door process for being able to dissemin fully unclassified threat information with the vendors in our catalog of commercial capabilities. And it allows us to send them notifications pretty quickly whenever necessary. So we see that as through this customer relationship management system, we can compile and gather together unclassified threat information that's relevant to potential commercial space vendors out there and really quickly disseminate it out. Now once we master and figure out the process for allowing vendors to access that front door system through a a separate instance, now we're going to have the ability for them to bilaterally share information back with us so that we can better inform space intelligence and space operations. And additionally for our government users out there in early 2027, we're targeting building a portal within our front door system that will allow government users to go in and help them put on things like industry events and reverse industry days. Because right now it's such an ad hoc process that every government organization out there is using different ways to register vendors and register user to their conferences and their events. But what we see is that there are unique capabilities out there already on the commercial side similar to for those who've ever put on a wedding. The Knot.com allows you to go in, kind of put on a wedding, walks you through all the steps, helps you send out invites, you know, RSVPs things like that? Well, we're in our front door system. We're working on building our own unique process for that. So any government user can go in, access that industry event planning portal and be able to put on their industry events. Because what we want is we want the date data on the front door side because everyone's going to be better informed if we have that data. And there's a lot of data getting lost in translation through things like industry events and reverse industry days alone. With regard to who attended, who participated in that event, who did we talk to and what was kind of the demand signal that we saw and how can we better align things like lines of funding and say spaceworks challenges to these events? Well, it's hard to define unless we have a process for being able to generate reports and really better analyze things like dashboards and metrics and key performance indicators. So quite a few things that we're building out right now. I feel for our team of programmers because they're working very hard every day, but they're doing great work.
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A
That's very exciting. How do you then you kind of touched on this. How do you see this scaling across both the US Government, but also to the NATO markets as well?
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B
So this is a good question as well. I hope people wouldn't say I have delusions of grandeur, but I do foresee that this vision, this concept of a front door process is applicable to just about everything. I don't see why we are limiting this to just space. Our focus is to scale this correctly in the space domain. But the fact that we've had an Air force for over 70 years, an army for over 250 years, navy as well, and we don't have front doors across those domains to better understand the commercial enterprise and in each different war fighting domain that it's frustrating to see because I understand that knowledge management is broken across the board and not just in the space community. So our first step is to scale this appropriately. We started scaling it with Space Systems Command. Now we're scaling it for the broader US Space force, including some of our partnered organizations like US Space Command within the command realm and integrating as many priorities as we can into a system that's going to benefit all across the board. We are targeting, going after opening up this front door process to the intelligence community as well as civil space as well, to breach the barrier between defense intelligence and civil space. And once we scale this appropriately in the space community, we hopefully can just take this and replicate it across all the warfighting domains. Including air, land, sea and cyber, and say, here you go, we've built it and we've packaged it, now go ahead and use it for your community. And now we can really understand the defense industrial base across all warfighting domains. Now, from a NATO perspective, we have been pretty communicative and discussions with our NATO alliance and our NATO partners out there with regard to the need for an international construct like the Frontier Door. And so we have been providing lessons learned. We have been sharing stories of how we built this, what we're getting after, the kind of manning and resourcing requirements to do something like this, the tech development requirements. And we are helping work with them to ensure that we can build something that would be useful for that entire NATO alliance. So we're still in some of the early stages. They're not necessarily using the exact same technology as us, but we are working to create whatever data integration is necessary to be able to communicate with the various systems out there, out there. So that's something that we, we fully anticipate that increases the demand signal not just domestically, but internationally as well for all the vendors within the front door system. And as we continue to breach those divides between that defense intelligence, civil and international space community, I think it's just gonna, it's gonna better inform both government and commercial alike. So lots of, lots of goals out there, lots of building, but our whole scalable intent and priority right now is let's get this right for the space community. And once we do domestically, we can take this and replicate it across the board anywhere and have a useful system that's going to help create efficiencies across the board.
- [32:40]
A
Great. Vic, last question. Wrap it up. How can companies engage? How can they get their capability statement added uploaded into your system?
- [32:51]
B
Now that's, that's a good question. We get that at just about every conference we go to. And I always say anyone can just Google USSF front door. It's going to be the first result anytime it's going to pop up for you and go in there, maybe read through a little bit, try to understand how your capability aligns to the various mission areas across the Space Force. We have a lot of education on there to help better inform vendors. We have some frequently asked questions. We have an about to kind of talk through what the front door does and doesn't do. We have events pages on there and just about every event on there that you'll see we specifically put on because it's, it's available to the public, it's open to the public. It is not an invite or you know, specific user specific organization only type thing. So they're all publicly available, anyone can go to them. And generally all those events on our front door page have some kind of government participation. Whether there's going to be SSC or CFC or STARCOM or some kind of space force or combatant command representative either giving speeches, participating in or just attending, it's a place that you can go to and maybe bump into some of these government users or maybe you have a chance to be able to engage with them. So we always put those events information on there and we keep that updated as much as possible. But what we really want vendors to do is hit that big yellow connect button at the top right corner that you'll see on the screen once you connect and share an idea, product or service with us. Now you can ask a simple question, that's going to be the option that you see on the left hand side. But if you ask a simple question, what that's going to do is it's going to create pretty much an IT ticket for us to be able to respond to pretty quick, quickly. But what we're really going to try to ask you to do is share an idea, product or service. If you do that, what it does is if you haven't already submitted to us, it's going to build a company profile in the backend system and allow us to share that information with the various government stakeholders out there. And when you share an idea, product or service, it's usually tailored towards a specific capability and it allows us to tailor our service to that capability and try to match that as much as possible. So again, I always push every company out there. If you haven't already submitted to the front front door, please do. Every time we get anything from our intelligence partners out there that might be fully unclassified threat information, type, threat fact sheet, things like that that we're currently putting out on a quarterly basis. If you submit share an idea, product or service with the front door, you'll be on the distribution list to be able to receive that threat information, those threat fact sheets. And as the cadence of threat information continues to grow with our future partners that we're integrating into this process, you'll continue to receive more threat information to help better posture you to develop your systems to have the resiliency necessary to get after some of the threats in space. So share your information with the front door and from a government perspective, contact the front door. We want to get you in the system, we want to identify what processes you're currently using for submission today, when vendors reach out to you, is it ad hoc? Is it directly to your inbox? Are they reaching out to you on Outlook? Let's direct them to the front door system. Let's start sharing that data and tracking that data a little more effectively because you might be TDY right now and you might not get to that message in a week or two as your outlook continues to get buried. But through the front door system we we can have a team of personnel on both your organization, my organization, and across the space community to be able to get after that capability and more proactively get after it.
- [36:01]
A
Great. Well thank you. Go ahead and Google US Space Force Front Door I confirmed before. You're absolutely right. It will pop up first link and you can get connected with the team. Victor Vigliotti Director, U.S. space Force Front Door Vic, thank you for joining us on the podcast today. Really appreciate you sharing your insight with our audience audience and thank you to you and your team for the important work you do every day.
- [36:25]
B
Thanks Mike. I appreciate it.