NT Concepts: Innovation and Expertise

Describe the company culture at NT Concepts.

We are committed to using innovation and expertise to help our national security clients solve their most critical challenges. Every employee operates with a mission-first mentality. For us, it’s about moving the needle for our clients. We do what’s right for today’s mission and ensure our customers are ready for the challenges and opportunities ahead. NT Concepts is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. We are incredibly proud of our shared success—it is a testament to the hard work of our leadership and employees, our history of delivery performance, and the strength of our customer relationships. 

Who are your primary customers, and what are their most significant challenges?

Our largest customer is the National Background Investigations Bureau (NBIB), where we provide support services for more than 2 million background investigations each year. We work with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) on several critical multi-INT visualization programs. We have prime contracts delivering enterprise IT and advanced analytics for multiple defense and intelligence agencies including prime AI/ML contracts. Each customer brings unique mission challenges, yet they all share the same underlying problems: data volume, legacy technology, and security.

Gavin Greene

We have a methodology called Marketplace Next focused on bringing commercial technologies to the federal government. There are four stages:

• Explore: We relentlessly pursue best-fit commercial tech.
• Examine: We measure return on investment and find the risk-versus- reward for potential deployment of the technology.
• Exchange: We do continuous collaboration to ensure mission fit.
• Excelerate: We “excel at accelerating” time to operational status for the government.

What advice do you have for companies looking to land their first contract with the federal government?

First, establish who you are and where you want to play. The magnitude of selling to the biggest buyers in the world can quickly overwhelm. Do your market research and target the agencies whose missions align with your business strategy. More importantly, get out there and get involved. Build networks. Join organizations such as USGIF, AFCEA, or other transaction authority consortiums.

Getting into the government space can be challenging. You need to understand the government’s playbook: the policies, regulations, and authorizations that must be checked off to successfully deliver. It’s important to develop relationships with trusted government contractors such as NT Concepts, who have the clearances, integration expertise, and ability to scale technology to meet their needs.

How do you stay sharp across a broad suite of offerings?

We constantly challenge each other to think bigger, answer client needs, and stand in the future. We go that extra mile to deliver solutions others can’t. For example, we’re a premier partner to the largest commercially-available GEOINT data providers in the world. Recently, we delivered a visualization solution that provides access to terabytes of data from a well-known technology that our client could not access before—now they can enhance their data and gain new insights.

For the Defense Information Systems Agency, we’re building a first-of-its-kind prototype for an enterprise case management system for background investigations. Because of our NBIB support, we are uniquely qualified to develop this system. We understand the complexities of a wide range of missions, and we know what is required to speed up security clearance processing times, bring down backlog, and scale to meet future mission needs.

How are you incorporating artificial intelligence into your solutions?

For the Intelligence Community, we’re standing up solutions for object detection, identification, and motion tracking in imagery and video. For complex data sets, we build custom jobs for data preparation, training, and inference. We use AI with sensor and Internet of Things data to help automate onboard prognostics and improve efficiency of logistics pipelines. We recently won a prime contract integrating AI for a large, commercial systems integrator, which will provide better performance for their multibillion-dollar platform. This is just the start. As the technology evolves, so will our expertise.

What excites NT Concepts most about the future of GEOINT?

GEOINT analysts today have a more data-driven view of the world than ever before, and “pattern of life” has become a key condition. However, machine learning has yet to become a foundational methodology for GEOINT. We believe that is about to change. We have seen NGA and the military express interest in employing machine learning to advance their capabilities, fund technology demonstrators, and even develop training datasets. We are excited to be part of this revolution.