Craig Adler, ’79, Executive Vice President, CFO and Board member of DLT Solutions, received the  Washington Business Journal’s “CFO of the Year: Government Contracting in 2011. Adler understands how maintaining strong relationships with his employees and manufacturers, including Google, Oracle and Symantec, achieves consistent business growth and financial results for clients.

As a native Washingtonian, Adler worked in public accounting for seven years specializing with clients in the government contracting sector.  From there, he became CFO of a client and then had various stints at ARC, CSC and a JV between SAIC and Rolls Royce.  He’s been fortunate to have gained a wealth of experience in all aspects of government and commercial engineering services companies both domestically and internationally.

Adler landed a DLT in November 2004 and has never looked back since.  Skills gained from prior employment with premier government contractors, including M&A, strategic planning, treasury, systems implementations, compliance operations, etc., has allowed him to take on the numerous challenges at DLT.  From a fledgling Value Added Reseller in 2004, with no documented processes, inadequate systems, inconsistent sales practices to our executive-led Management buyout in 2005 and then growing the company by more than 20%  per year in a recessionary period, to bringing on investors and an expanded credited facility in 2009.  DLT is now a best in class VAR with over $700M in revenues, strong margin profile with a flagship set of vendor partners that continue to expand with the likes of BMC, Google and Amazon.

Adler is now responsible for all of the Financial and administrative affairs of the company including contracts, legal, program management, information technology and human resources.

Adler continues to see tremendous opportunities in various aspects of Cloud Computing (IaaS, SaaS), data center consolidation including converged hardware & software, and increased emphasis on storage and security.  When it comes to the Cloud offerings, because the government is funded on a year by year basis, they can’t buy Cloud services similar to the commercial sector; therefore we are seeing a wide range of Cloud computing business models trying to accommodate the government funding process.

Now that the best in class infrastructure is in place, Adler is playing a key role, along with the leadership team, in expanding DLT value by increasing technical talent with key Subject Matter Experts, pre-sales engineers and growing our organic services offerings.  Each of these initiatives will fundamentally make DLT a much stronger and deeper company, bring more value to vendor partners, while strengthening DLT margins and allowing the company to grow well into the future.

Adler believes you can’t be afraid to over hire.  In order for DLT to continue to be successful and drive the results the company has become accustomed to seeing, DLT must hire the best professionals, keep them challenged and match them up with the right roles and responsibilities.  “At the end of the day it’s all about the ‘double bottom line (as quoted from Ted Leonsis)’ – strong financial results in tandem with an enriched leadership team.

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