Attain, LLC, off to a fast start in professional services arena

Greg Baroni

It was less than one year ago when Greg Baroni, a veteran executive in the professional services arena, along with his partners at newly launched Attain, LLC, acquired many of the assets, ongoing contracts and personnel that had been owned by BearingPoint, Inc., but were not picked up by Deloitte when it acquired most of BearingPoint’s business assets out of bankruptcy.

By purchasing those BearingPoint contracts, Vienna, VA-based Attain was able to enter the professional services marketplace -- particularly with federal, state and local government customers, and educational institutions – with a portfolio of ongoing work, rather than as a fledgling start-up, Baroni told GSN in an interview on February 17.

Attain, which was formally founded in January 2009 and became operational two months later, says it now employs about 200 people and delivers, IT security, operational support and healthcare solutions to more than 100 customers. It is hoping to become one of the “elite” professional services firms in the government and educational niches, but says it has no plans to enter either the corporate market in the U.S. or to seek international customers.

Baroni serves as Attain’s chairman and CEO, after serving in leadership positions for nearly 30 years at KPMG Consulting (which changed its name to BearingPoint in 2002) and at Unisys Corp. He was joined in a telephone interview with GSN by Tim Kelleher, Attain’s vice president of federal sales, who is spearheading the firm’s pursuit of IT security work.

Both executives are pleased that the general downturn that has plagued broad swaths of the U.S. economy has not had a similar affect in the professional services niche in the public sector. “The government market tends to be immune to that,” observed Baroni. He noted that such market research firms as Gartner and Input concur in his sense that professional services for government customers remains a “dynamic and growing” business.

In the realm of IT security, Attain’s customers, and prospects, may have already tackled such fundamental building blocks as firewalls and intrusion detection systems, Kelleher said, but “our clients are desperately looking for more information.” Attain intends to provide that expertise.

He noted that many companies are worried that they are doing too little to secure their computer networks, while others are worried they are hurting their bottom lines by doing too much.

Attain plans to focus its efforts in aspects of IT security that are attracting a great deal of attention these days, including cloud computing, messaging, collaborations among employees and organizations, and servicing software applications.

The company is particularly keen on helping its customers develop the “speed and precision” in their IT security efforts not only to know when they have been compromised by a cyber-attack, but also to know how to return to a prior state, when their network was functioning properly. For example, Attain wants to empower its customers to instantly detect a denial of service attack, or a sequel injection, or a malware injection, while those attacks are occurring, and be able to recover promptly from such an attack. Kelleher wants his clients to be able to say: “An attack happened. I’m not happy about that. But I know I can get back to a prior state.”

In addition, Attain intends to devote a lot of time and energy looking at the massive amounts of information gathered by “darknet” covert communication networks or “honeypots” and figuring out how its customers can leverage that information to better protect themselves, explained Kelleher.

On February 22, Attain announced it has closed 26 new contracts and contract continuations worth more than $13 million since last September. Among its initial wins was a one-year continuation with the U.S. Army to provide strategic services to the Reserve Component Automation Systems (RCAS) Project Directorate, which provides IT support to the Army Reserve. Attain has also landed contracts with a host of educational institutions, including Johns Hopkins University, for which it will help develop what are known as “facilities and administrative” (F&A) rate proposals.