Following the news that Aqua IT had added former DISA, NGA lead Jamie Nichols, bolstering their expertise in Data, Cloud, and Cyber Operations, we caught up to learn more about his move to join this innovative small business leader focused on helping customers dominate and win by building, modernizing, enhancing, securing, and transforming their products, systems, and data.
Why Aqua IT?
As a senior technologist that has dedicated my entire career to solving hard problems alongside contractors constrained by the FAR, I have seen the benefits of both civil servants and contractor managed capabilities. The pros and cons of both models have always created unique constraints when trying to accomplish the mission. Aqua-IT gets their name from its unique workforce that blends Government (blue badged) and contractor (green Badged) culture into one (Aqua badge) that gets the job done. I believe the company’s rapid growth is a testament to its Innovative operational model and diverse agile talent acquisition. As a technologist I believe I will be able to compliment all the strategic work being performed by Aqua-IT.
Evolving A Growing AI Portfolio
Aqua is a small innovative company and I plan to contribute across the entire portfolio. I think the biggest contribution will be as we expand our Intellectual property leveraging different aspects of Artificial Intelligence through the CDAO Tradewind marketplace. We currently have one service offering leveraging Agentic AI and we plan to develop two more supporting Cybersecurity and enabling Zero Trust Reference Architecture (ZTRA) capabilities.
Supporting Government Demands for Efficiency
I think we all see the trend on how AI will augment the workforce and change all aspects of operations in the Government. We have a pipeline of strategic efforts that will compete across the government in that space. I believe another trend that we will see this fiscal year is a demand from the Government to create efficiency across costly mission areas. We have a couple of programs that align to area such as our ZTRA platform that enables government agencies that are strategically aligned to bidirectionally share AI models reducing cost while increasing operational coverage as a community. We also have an Agentic AI capability called Celeritas which was recently accessed as awardable on the Chief Digital and AI Office (CDOA) Tradewinds marketplace.
About Jamie Nichols
My Career started with the Marine Corps when I graduated boot camp a couple days prior to September 11th, 2001. This was a challenging time for everyone but also when Cyber Operations was a new and emerging problem for the DoD. I came in as the Marines initially started developing the Tactical Data Network Specialist occupational field, so my military school I was taught how to deploy and secure tactical networks which created a passion for solving hard problems in very constrained environments. During my 8 years in the Marine Corps, I deployed across the globe to Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Spain, Germany, Afghanistan, Kuwait and multiple times to Iraq. The entire time designing, deploying and sustaining enterprise IT in support of the DOD. This influential time in my career still resonates with me and defines my ethos as I lead and execute within the DoD/IC mission space. My first civilian Job after Active Duty was The Enterprise Directory and Messaging Architect working for the organization currently called the Marine Corps Cyber Operations Group (MCCOG) out of Quantico, VA. During this period of time, I helped design the Marine Corps Worldwide (MCW) architecture and concept. This was initially started as a way to cost effectively provide enterprise-wide services to 5 Marine Corps units that did not get absorbed by the 10+ billion dollar outsourcing contract called the Navy and Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI). 5 years later the cost effective and mission focused MCW model ended up showing the art of the possible and defined how the Marine Corps would divest from the NMCI architecture and to the Next Generation (NGEN) architecture which is currently used today.
In 2012 I was offered a promotion working for Marine Corps Intelligence Activity (MCIA) designing and implementing a similar centrally managed enterprise architecture across SCI networks that also required services to be extended to the tactical edge. This allowed me to take all the lessons learned from the massive scale collateral mission and tactical network expertise developed on active duty and apply them to the Intelligence mission area. During this time, I was also introduced to challenging petabyte level scale data science and infrastructure problems which started to become a passion area for me in addition to Defensive Cyber Operations. After working for MCIA and the IC for 5 years I relocated my family to the midwest working for DISA Global Operations Command (DGOC) leading a couple strategic efforts which included DoD Big Data Platform (BDP), DCO tools, Cyber Exercise planning supporting the newly established DODIN Cyber protection teams. These programs expanded my expertise in the application of AI/ML in support of Defensive Cyber Operations while also developing knowledge on DoDIN operations and post forensic analysis. At this time in my career, I decided I wanted to go back to the Intelligence community and focus exclusively on operationalizing AI and was selected as the Technology and Innovation chief as a principal data engineer within National Geospatial-Intelligence Activity (NGA) on the newly established Data Corps team. In this new and challenging role I led and mentored 10 Data Scientist and Engineers working on countless programs supporting national security and defense. After 7 years in the IC I felt the need to work closer with the war fighter and took a position with the United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) as the senior Cloud and Security Architect. In this position I helped develop the Zero Trust strategy and developed the enterprise blueprint that strategically documents the current enterprise architecture and shows how it is transformed to achieve 2027 target objectives. The development of these artifacts required a culmination of expertise that I acquired across my entire career which included Data Science, IT operations, Defensive Cyber Operations, Cloud, and DevSecOps.
