By: Dawn Zoldi
The world produces more location-based data than any analyst, agency or algorithm can handle alone. Satellites image near-complete coverage of the earth’s surface. Sensors track objects in orbit. Ground networks log activity around the clock. The question that drew more than 4,000 professionals from over 30 countries to this year’s GEOINT Symposium 2026 was not how to collect more of it, but how to secure it, move it, analyze it and act on it before the moment of decision passes.
Most technology at the event shared the common goal of converting raw data into actionable intelligence, including the companies in Carahsoft’s partner pavilion. Carahsoft, The Trusted IT Solutions Provider®, has spent nearly two decades assembling a responsive ecosystem of companies whose work fits together not just commercially, but operationally. This year, the depth of that portfolio reflects just how much ground the mission now covers.
GEOINT: What It Is and Why It Matters
For the uninitiated, GEOINT, or geospatial intelligence, can sound abstract. Ronda Schrenk, CEO of the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), a former imagery analyst and GIS professional with more than 20 years in government service, explained, “Geospatial is location data. Everything happens at a place and a time, whether it’s on, above, or below the earth’s surface; whether it’s today, yesterday or tomorrow. And the intelligence piece of it involves the tradecraft that makes sense of it.”
USGIF is the nonprofit that produces the GEOINT Symposium and serves as the professional home of the community of GEOINT stakeholders, from the Department of Defense (DoD), the intelligence community (IC), allied nations, commercial technology companies as well as a growing roster of non-traditional users who depend on location intelligence to do their jobs. This year’s symposium drew just over 4,000 attendees from more than 30 countries and over 400 international partners. Schrenk continued, “GEOINT is the foundation of all decision-making. Everything that happens in national security depends on understanding where something happened and why it’s important.” That imperative shaped everything that followed on the show floor, including the work of the six Carahsoft partners profiled below.
Cloudera: The Data Fabric Underneath the Mission
Cloudera functions as an enterprise data management platform, or “the underlying data fabric that connects disparate information sources, whether structured or unstructured, on-premises or in the cloud,” according to Clay Michael, senior federal account executive at the company, who has spent the majority of his career supporting the IC, in roles spanning operations and consulting to his current sales role.
For the GEOINT community, which generates and depends on vast repositories of private, classified data that cannot be shared with public AI models or large language models (LLMs), Cloudera delivers private AI capabilities with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems and fine-tuning workflows. The platform scales from raw data ingestion all the way to application and analytics layers, with security and data lineage built in.
Joon Kim, a Sr. Solutions Engineer for the DoD and IC at Cloudera, further explained, “We deliver the private AI capability in any hybrid-cloud and multi-environment with AI Studios, including RAG and Agent development tools that tune the data, and provide application, visualization, and analytics capability at scale with security layers for Data Governance and Lineage as an enterprise data platform.”
At the show, Cloudera introduced the company’s newly updated AI studios. These make advanced analytics and AI capabilities more accessible to data scientists and software developers who need to bring those tools into production environments quickly.
The company has supported the DoD and IC for more than ten years and works closely with major systems integrators to deliver capabilities into existing and emerging government programs. Learn more about Cloudera by visiting cloudera.com or by connecting with a Cloudera representative.
Elastic: Finding What Matters in a Sea of Data
Elastic began as an open-source data company and built its reputation on handling large-scale unstructured and semi-structured data at speed. Elastic is already embedded as a core product at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and supports analysts in finding patterns across text, imagery, geospatial data, video and audio simultaneously.
“Geospatial is one type of unstructured data that we do very well with matching, landing and helping analysts find things in,” explained John Hepler, Regional Vice President (RVP) responsible for IC business at Elastic, who brings years of experience in cleared, national security-focused technology sales. He continued, “Combining text, image, geospatial, video, and audio all together is very helpful for analysts.”
New at the show this year, Elastic demonstrated a partnership with NVIDIA that delivers 12 times faster data indexing using GPUs compared to CPUs, even in fully disconnected tactical environments. The demonstration showed that operators in the field can land data, index it and begin discovering insights almost instantly, a critical capability for time-sensitive missions. Hepler also noted that Elastic’s search and vector-matching technology powers applications civilians use daily, such as Netflix recommendations, Uber’s ride-matching and Home Depot’s product search. Learn more about Elastic and its vast portfolio at elastic.co.
F5: Securing the Applications That Drive Operations
F5 is an application delivery and security company. It manages web traffic, provides web application firewalling and handles SSL offloading to ensure that applications reach their users securely and without interruption, regardless of how they are deployed. For the GEOINT community, where analysts and operators depend on applications running reliably in complex, often sensitive environments, F5 provides a foundational security layer.
“F5 makes apps go. We can deliver apps any way you want and protect and secure them,” said Colin McKeown, DoD and IC team lead with the F5 Carahsoft team, who represents F5 across the full spectrum of government procurement, from GSA and ESI schedule holding to lead generation and pricing.
The headline news from F5 at GEOINT 2026 was its acquisition of Clipso AI. This adds a red-teaming capability to F5’s portfolio that sends automated agents into a customer’s environment to identify security gaps before a bad actor can exploit them. This is particularly relevant as AI tools proliferate inside government networks and introduce new attack surfaces. F5 then produces a remediation report to help agencies patch vulnerabilities proactively. Contact Colin McKeown at 571-662-4227 or visit the F5 section at carahsoft.com to learn more.
GitLab: DevSecOps from Code to Completion
GitLab is a full-spectrum DevSecOps platform that manages the entire software development lifecycle in a single, integrated environment. The company works specifically with federal system integrators (FSIs), including large defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and GDIT.
“GitLab DevSecOps starts at the very beginning, building your software to the end,” noted Caitlin Iliff, a public sector senior business development representative (BDR) at GitLab Federal, a dedicated subsidiary of GitLab serving the public sector. “As you continuously build, we have a program that sends you alerts if you have breakages, so your teams can go back in, change the coding.”
GitLab does this by running automatic testing, including static analysis, dynamic analysis and software bill of materials (SBOM) generation, continuously as code is built, instead of relying on separate security tools that must interoperate. For the GEOINT community, this means that geospatial software applications are being developed, tested and secured without the fragility that comes from stitching together multiple legacy tools.
At the show, GitLab highlighted its Agentic AI capability as one of its latest developments. This new strategic direction enables teams to deploy AI agents within their own contained development environments to accelerate software delivery while preserving security boundaries. With new features released monthly, agencies working with GitLab don’t have to wait years for capability updates. Learn more at gitlab.com, a site that includes documentation, integration guides and migration resources.
Delinea: Securing Every Identity, Everywhere
Delinea is a leader in identity security. The company discovers and governs privileged accounts, applies security policies, and provides analytics and forensic auditing across every identity in an organization’s ecosystem, from privileged human accounts and infrastructure access to application-level governance and non-human identities. In the federal and IC space, where the consequences of a compromised credential can be mission-critical, Delinea’s deep integrations with partner technologies and government environments make it a foundational layer of any Zero Trust architecture.
Albert Beattie, senior technical partner manager at Delinea, has spent over 20 years in cybersecurity “building, breaking, and repairing systems,” before dedicating his career to identity security. He helps security leaders focus on what attackers actually target: access and identity. I’ve worked with organizations where identity failures caused operational shutdowns, not just alerts. In his words, ” “We discover every identity across your environment, on-premises, in the cloud, even in air-gapped and segregated networks, govern access, enforce least-privilege policies, and give you the analytics and forensic audit trail to know exactly what happened, when, and by whom.”
As for what’s new, Beattie explained that identity governance now extends well beyond human users. The joiners, movers and leavers of a traditional workforce now share the environment with a new category: non-human AI agent identities. Delinea can discover, monitor and constrain those AI agents to ensure they operate only within sanctioned boundaries, and alert security teams if unauthorized agents appear in the environment. Visit delinea.com or contact Albert Beattie at albert.beattie@delinea.com to learn more.
Infoblox: Knowing What’s on Your Network
Infoblox was founded 25 years ago in the DDI market to manage the domain name system (DNS), dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP), and IP address management (IPAM) and has expanded over the last decade into network security. In practice, Infoblox helps organizations know exactly what devices and entities are on their networks, where they originate and whether they represent a threat.
DNS, the system that translates human-readable addresses into the IP addresses computers use, is one of the most common vectors for cyberattacks, explained Chris Brown, an Information Security and DDI Specialist at Infoblox Public Sector, who focused on the intersection of network infrastructure and security. This makes monitoring and security a non-negotiable mission priority.
For the GEOINT community, tracking where data originates and travels, both as an intelligence function and as a network defense function, is core tradecraft. “If you know where your IP addresses are coming from and going to, that’s a central part of what we do, and geospatial is all about identifying threats overall,” Brown said. Infoblox brings that discipline to the infrastructure layer to help IC and DoD networks maintain visibility and resilience. Explore white papers, solution notes and contact options at infoblox.com.
Carahsoft: Building the Stack
The six companies profiled here represent one half of Carahsoft’s GEOINT 2026 partners we interviewed, but they already cover the full depth of the mission’s technical demands: enterprise data management, search and analytics, application security, software development, identity governance and network visibility. Carahsoft, The Trusted IT Solutions Provider® and Master Aggregator™, has structured its geospatial partner ecosystem specifically so that agencies don’t have to choose between best-of-breed solutions and interoperability. These companies are designed to work alongside one another.Part two of this series, publishing tomorrow, profiles the remaining six partners, covering cloud infrastructure, AI observability, space operations intelligence and the governance frameworks agencies need to deploy AI responsibly at scale. To learn more about Carahsoft’s geospatial and intelligence community partner portfolio in the meantime, visit carahsoft.com or connect with Lacey Wean at lacey.wean@carahsoft.com.