WashingtonExec – The finalists for WashingtonExec’s Pinnacle Awards were announced Oct. 8, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place virtually Nov. 12.
Next up is Intelligence Industry Exec of the Year finalist Ed Bachl, who’s senior vice president for Defense & Intelligence Solutions at SOS International LLC. Here, he talks key achievements and successes in his career, taking professional risks and shaping the next generation of industry leaders.
What key achievements did you have in 2019/2020?
I joined SOSi in July 2019 after Vykin Corp., a company I co-founded, was acquired by SOSi. Perhaps my most significant accomplishment since joining SOSi was leading the successful integration of both companies. The smooth integration paid dividends almost immediately, as SOSi earned a spot on a potential 10-year, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract that provides a wide range of analytic and operational support services to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The multiple-award IDIQ contract — known as Solutions for Intelligence Analysis 3 — is the primary contract vehicle for providing analytical intelligence support to Department of Defense warfighters, planners and policy professionals worldwide. It was a significant win for our business. Not only did we enter a new tier of competition, but the award also firmly establishes SOSi as a trusted provider of intelligence services.
In June of this year, we realigned the company’s business units once again, integrating our intelligence analysts, information operations and technical collection capabilities with SOSi’s world-class engineering, cybersecurity and mission IT expertise. The new Defense & Intelligence Solutions business, which I lead, manages dozens of programs stretching across four continents. Positioning our talented cadre of analysts, developers and IT professionals within one business unit give us a tremendous market discriminator.
For example, we can incorporate actual user feedback taken from our analysts in the field to develop more effective mission applications, networks and IT solutions that meet our customers’ current and future needs. We also folded many of our commercial open source intelligence solutions into my portfolio, enabling us to better leverage these solutions to help our different defense and intelligence customers address their unique problem sets.
Lastly, the company’s investment in artificial intelligence-enabled technologies, including its investment in automatic speech recognition and neural machine translation leader, AppTek, and advanced analytics company, NorthStar Solutions, provides us with powerful discriminators that position us well for the future.
What has made you successful in your current role?
Click here to read the rest of Bachl’s interview posted on the WashingtonExec website.
