John Zangardi, the department's chief information officer, led the group scheduled to visit Qualcomm, AttackIQ, MindTouch, Brain Corp., Ausgar Technologies, Unisys, FICO, Webroot and Illumina on Monday and today. The IT group is also visiting companies in the Silicon Valley.
"You don't typically see large government organizations in the world of information technology bringing their whole team to one place to see what the latest technologies are," said retired Rear Adm. Ken Slaght, head of San Diego's Cyber Center of Excellence, an industry trade group that helped organize the tour.
While several local companies were considered, the Cyber Center of Excellence and San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. picked nine local firms to highlight the diversity of technologies being developed in the region.
"They wanted to come out and talk to the Qualcomm folks to find out where 4G and 5G was headed in the future," Slaght said. "We had the opportunity to expose them to companies you would not normally associate with information technology, like Illumina. But they are doing extraordinary things with artificial intelligence and big data. There is a lot of interest in that."
DHS is budgeted to spend about $6.8 billion on information technology in fiscal 2018 as it embarks on several system modernization projects.
"My strategic objectives are simple," Zangardi said in a statement. "We are moving the DHS network to a managed service, consolidating our security operations centers and moving to the cloud, and we can't accomplish any of these without industry."
Zangardi previously was CIO with the Navy Department and acting CIO for the Department of Defense. Over the years, he has brought his IT personnel to tour Bay Area tech companies. San Diego was included last year for the first time at the behest of Pat Sullivan, executive director of the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) center, Slaght said.
During the San Diego tour, DHS personnel got briefings on cybersecurity, robotics, machine learning, data analytics and life sciences.
(c)2018 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
