By Geoff Fein
GoAhead Software is partnering with Global Technical Systems (GTS) and Northrop Grumman [NOC] to bring its solution for Dynamic Resource Management (DRM) to the Common Processing System (CPS) ensuring continuous service of warfighter systems without loss of service or data, the company said.
GoAhead’s SAFfire solution delivers on one of the key goals of the CPS architecture by ensuring the high availability of mission critical applications, according to the company.
“GoAhead offers the only proven combat-ready and operationally proven Service Availability Forum (SAF) compliant solution in the commercial market and SAFfire adheres to the open standards of the Navy’s Objective Architecture (OA),” the company said in a statement.
The Bellevue, Wash.-based company competed against two others before being selected by GTS, Tyson Moler, director of federal operations, told Defense Daily recently.
“We competed against essentially brand new competitors for us in this defense market space,” he said. “[We] out performed them from a technical, as well as a cost, standpoint.”
GoAhead was selected following a trade study conducted by the CPS team, Moler noted.
“GoAhead’s history of delivering mission critical high availability solutions to U.S. Navy combat systems, coupled with their industry-leading Service Availability Forum open standards implementation, should ensure optimum performance and the lowest risk solution for our Navy customer,” Terry Spitzer, chief executive officer, GTS, told Defense Daily yesterday.
GoAhead is no stranger to either Northrop Grumman or GTS. Moler pointed out the company has had the opportunity to work closely with both defense firms on CPS.
“We actually provided architecture design service support to Northrop Grumman. The professional services is the consulting side of our business. We are not only software licenses but also services,” he said. “We provided this architecture design service to Northrop Grumman in support of CDR (critical design review). As you know, CDR was very successful.”
While landing the opportunity to be part of CPS, the contract award should open more doors for the software company, Moler added.
“As we look forward to CPS’ success we not only see other surface Navy opportunities within IWS but also within C4I and other service branches,” he said.
While CPS should be a successful program in its own right within the program executive office for integrated warfare systems (PEO IWS), Moler noted that the system should also be recognized throughout the service branches and hopefully open many doors for GoAhead and its CPS partners.
And Moler pointed out that GoAhead’s solution is platform agnostic. If the Navy were for some reason down the road to go with a different cabinet manufacturer, computing platform or operating system, SAFfire would fit right in.
“The nice thing is that the DRM services, as CPS refers to it, is a universal service, or independent service, to the actual…platform we are working on,” he said. “We believe that not only does it validate us for the domain specific activities of surface ship combat systems, but that it will be a strong leverage point for us with other capture efforts.”
GoAhead started out working on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), high availability and fault management systems as a middleware solution for telecommunications systems and networks, Moler said.
“What’s interesting for us [is that] the marketplace is evolving. As our success continues, other companies are taking notice. We have other companies trying to enter into this resource management, fault management, high availability niche. Our competition is growing,” he said. “However, from a marketplace standpoint, we look at cross industries– telecom and others–we have 80 percent of the commercial market share.”
Adding in work GoAhead does for the Department of Defense, that market share climbs up to 95 percent, if not higher, Moler said. “We feel really fortunate to be in that position.”
GTS’ Common Processing System is baselined in the Navy’s Advanced Capability Build (ACB) 12. Moler said he anticipates future ACBs will continue to utilize the CPS system.
“There are going to be three FAUs (first article units) that GTS will be developing…building, shortly. There is speculation for some amount of advanced production units which would also be starting development in FY ’10,” he said. “There is going to be a good number built over the next year or so purely with CPS and with the goal of delivering to ACB 12.”
In addition to the CPS program, GoAhead’s solution is the first commercial-off-the-shelf resource management solution to be part of a successful Navy combat operational test, in support of the Aegis Weapon System.