By Cristina McEachern, VARBusiness
VARBusiness, Fri. May. 27, 2005

From the June 13, 2005 VARBusiness

They're big and getting bigger. Government integrators are seeing consistent growth year-over-year, and GovernmentVAR is putting those numbers in black and white. Building on the success of last year's Top 100 Federal Integrators list, GovernmentVAR and the VARBusiness research team decided to take the list a step further this year and prepared a ranking of 100 of the biggest public-sector integrators that encompasses not only the federal sector, but the state and local sectors as well.

The companies on this year's list run the gamut from the biggest of the big contractors that focus exclusively on the federal government

to Worthington, Ohio-based Cott Systems, which derives 100 percent of its revenue from local government customers, and Burlingame, Calif.-based Tangent, which sees more than $12 million in revenue from its state- and local-focused government business. This year's list witnessed roughly 90 percent of the 100 seeing revenue growth from 2003 to 2004.

Topping the list this year for the highest reported revenue from government customers in 2004 was Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin, with approximately $8.9 billion in revenue, up from a reported $7.8 billion in 2003.

And speaking of billions in government revenue, an astounding 12 of the GovernmentVAR 100 hit the mark and joined the coveted billion-dollar group.

The Top 10 on this year's list includes the aforementioned Lockheed, followed by IBM Global Services with $6.9 billion, Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) with $6.1 billion, Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) with $5.8 billion, Northrop Grumman with $5.1 billion, EDS, $2.9 billion, ACS, $2.2 billion, Accenture with just under $2 billion, and BearingPoint and CDW Government, both with revenue of $1.3 billion.

The median 2004 revenue generated from the players on this year's GovernmentVAR 100 was $61 million, with a whopping 19 percent median growth rate from 2003 to 2004.

As for averages, the list, which must be noted includes the dozen billion-dollar companies that can skew the average up a bit, saw 2004 government revenue of more than $543 million and an average growth rate of 37 percent.

In terms of key technologies sold to government customers, a separate first-quarter 2005 survey of VARBusiness 500 executives found that security, storage and VoIP are topping the list of most important technologies for their government customers.

As our most comprehensive listing to date, the GovernmentVAR 100 is an overview of 100 government-focused solution providers. While not an exact science, it's a start to building a better understanding of the government integrator landscape.