By Ann Roosevelt
Cobham Defense Systems (CDS), a division of the U.K.’s Cobham Plc, is moving away from its low profile style, sweeping together several businesses into CDS and pursuing a rebranding strategy to provide better clarity and a broader reach for its customers, a senior executive said.
“For customers that are looking for us to put together more integrated capabilities and solutions, we clearly have not addressed that in the past,” Jeremy Wensinger, CDS president told Defense Daily in an interview. “Pulling this division together, common branding has enabled us to go do that.”
There are still, and will continue to be, customers who come to Cobham because of its capability in one area, be it antennas or tactical communications, for example.
“Where I have seen a shift though, is customers saying I didn’t realize you had that breadth, we would like for you to look at a maybe a bigger subsystem role on these platforms,” Wensinger said. “We’re never going to own the platform, we just don’t have the scale to do that.”
For prime contractors, the Cobham rebranding offers the potential to put several elements under one partner, simplifying the process, while bringing the rigor and discipline of a company its size rather than the prime subcontracting to several smaller companies.
“There’s a subtle change that occurs when you go from a vendor to a mission partner,” he said. “I think our objective has been to be a mission partner first. I think we grew up as a vendor. Our objective now is to be that mission partner for our primes and our end customers.”
Rebranding allows customers to see the breadth of the company.
“No one in the United States has ever gone to space without using one of our air breathing systems,” he said. “We own well over 90 percent of the total market for in-flight refueling. That’s the heritage of the company.”
For example, when the company bought REMEC Defense, it retained that name until it was moved to become part of the CDS division.
Also as part of the strategy, last fall Wensinger was hired to create the CDS division from four strategic business units in the United States and United Kingdom.
Another Cobham division, Mission Systems, is headquartered in Davenport, Iowa, and the Avionics and Surveillance division has a presence in the United States.
“When you look at Cobham’s total revenue along with what I have here, more than 50 percent of the company is deriving its revenue out of the U.S.,” Wensinger said.
CDS division now consists of the former SPARTA, and a strategic business unit called Sensor Systems, consisting of the acquisitions of REMEC Defense, M/A-COM, and other capabilities.
Another CDS unit, a U.K.-based antenna business is part of the Northrop Grumman [NOC] Cobham Intercoms LLC (NGCI LLC) team that in June won the VIS-X Vehicular Intercommunication System Expanded for the Army’s Communications and Electronics Command. The total value of the 10-year ID/IQ contract has an anticipated not-to-exceed ceiling of $2.4 billion.
Parent Cobham plc has four divisions, CDS, Mission Systems, Avionics and Surveillance and Aviation Services. The first three are technology divisions.
“What defines us best, is a 360 degree mission perspective,” Wensinger said. “Our end objective has been trying to get that warfighter the flexibility to be able to consume information in a way that enables them to make the right decision at the right time and not be constrained by the device, pipe size or whatever it is.”
CDS’ space is the C4ISR world, where the challenge is to give warfighters the same worldwide capability they would have sitting in their own home, he said. What’s different is the level of security.
Wensinger said he particularly enjoys listening to how his equipment is used. “We’ve gotten some of the best feedback that has shaped next-generation products from the end user.”
For example, today those in a tactical vehicle wear headsets to communicate on the intercom system. Because it’s a wired headset, the cord tends to get tangled, he said. A challenge is how to put a wireless headset in that tactical environment. That brings up such things as how many wireless “things” can you have inside that environment and how to secure the voice information. And separately, these are over-the-ear headsets and the temperature inside a tactical vehicle during a six to eight hour shift can make the user ever hotter in an environment such as Iraq in the summer. Cobham is looking for ways to shrink the footprint of the headset yet provide the same audio quality as before.
Wensinger tells customers to get involved in Cobham’s research and development effort. “I don’t want to spend a dollar of R&D that’s not going to solve one of your problems.”
The Army is now focusing on incremental upgrades for modernization, Cobham is as well. “Every defense dollar that we spend needs to be preciously spent and so our allies share the same issue, I think there has been a convergence in trying to understand where can we try to find a commonality, but still respecting the sovereignty of a nation’s need to have uniqueness.”
In the future, Wensinger sees opportunity. “The business that I run, characterized as right down Main Street for C4I–I don’t see that need diminishing. I don’t see the threat going away… We need better, more timely information and more importantly, in the format and on the device of your choice. It’s important to focus on what the user needs, when he needs it. My objective is to give them equal to or better capability in that last tactical mile than they could get at their own home.
Another part of the core Cobham strategy is continued business acquisitions. “The company is a very acquisitive company, very acquisitive. It is part of the DNA that made Cobham what Cobham is,” Wensinger said. n