Jax tech company bets on stateside-focus to revolutionize federal IT contracting (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — Jacksonville-based skills training technology company SkillStorm believes it holds the secret to the future of federal contracting.
In the wake of DOGE cuts nationwide, CEO Justin Vianello said his company is uniquely positioned to drive innovation and growth while simultaneously cutting costs for businesses.
A core business line of SkillStorm is government contracting. The company custom builds technology teams domestically, promising a cost efficiency that’s 20% and 45% cheaper than equivalent personnel on the market, according to Vianello.
As the federal government’s priorities shift toward cost savings, the need for highly trained technology employees has changed even in the last five months alone.
“There’s been a lot of noise about high tech consultants who are actually adding value and not actually leading to project delivery,” Vianello said. “What we’ve seen is increased focus on times of value. So, how quickly can we do this implementation, how quickly can we get to use out of these licenses and then what is the reasonable cost to do that.”
SkillStorm moved its headquarters to Jacksonville in 2020 and has a long history of partnering with local universities to train students. The company’s business model is based on having employers pay for the training, which is free to students. Soon after its move to North Florida, it launched a partnership with Jacksonville University to do just that.
In the years since, SkillStorm’s university partnership ecosystem has expanded. When a customer has a need, the company will tap into the local community to meet that need. Those lines of employees include students, veterans and those Vianello called “people who are underemployed.”
“These are people that may have a computer science degree, but maybe working at Starbucks, just as an example,” he said. “ And so we will recruit people in that location that build out that specific team for the customer to make sure that we are servicing the customer the best we can in that particular location.”
The strength of SkillStorm is that it’s designed to bring in people, train them in specialized technologies to certification and then deploy them. SkillStorm takes on all the risk in training people, Vianello explained, which grants a greater return on investment for customers.
Where other companies are focusing on nearshoring manufacturing, SkillStorm is honed in on doing the same with employees.
“What we do is, we build domestic tech teams … We are creating jobs in the U.S. for the future,” Vianello told the Business Journal. “We are dealing with a stream of debt crisis by making sure that our jobs are not being offshored.”