Christopher Chapin, a Northeastern University graduate, while referring to a commitment from the General Services Administration to invest $50 billion in federal telecom contracts over the next 15 years with 10 American companies was a moment of gasp in the room. Chapin, senior vice president and chief information officer at Granite Telecommunications explained, “We are growing rapidly, by about $150 million a year. And with the government business, we expect that to go to more like $350 to $500” million.
Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions is a program that puts Granite, a young, privately-held firm which won one of those bids last year on the front line of a federal plan to shore up cybersecurity’s main purpose of elevating U.S. standards in light of global cyberthreats. That commitment is the reason why the 20 Northeastern students had been invited to lunch in a conference room in Quincy, Massachusetts. It is a pivotal part of the government’s new program. Robert Conner, who develops applications for Granite quoted, “Just being selected for the list of approved vendors isn’t enough. Because now we have to implement all those standards that we agreed to follow. And anytime you change any data in the government system, you need to see who made the change and when the change was made.”
Conner earlier planned to hire mere four to five co-ops only but the profiles of the northeastern university’s applicants were quite fascinating. They had some experience along with the skills that the company was craving for. Most of the co-ops at Granite’s Quincy headquarters have been grouped together in big cubicles. They feel comfortable drawing close full-time staffers with questions, said Poojith Shankar Shetty, who has earned his masters in 2019.
“It gives us an early advantage from a recruiting perspective,” Chapin said of Granite’s reliance on co-ops.
Harminder Singh