What the government doesn't do these days

Want to know how cautious the government is being about spending money lately? An incident from the TechAmerica Foundation's American Technology Awards ceremony, held June 13 in Washington, D.C., may illustrate it.

Kevin Johnson, CEO of Juniper Networks, showed a video as part of his acceptance of the corporate leadership award. The video highlighted Juniper's three areas of emphasis – the programmable network, cloud architecture and security innovation – with dramatized scenes to show how the technologies may work in the near future.

Following Johnson, Homeland Security department CIO Richard Spires took the stage to accept the award for Government Technology Executive of the Year. As the applause died down, he said, “Here in the federal government these days, we don't do things like slick videos. But I was very impressed.”