By Geoff Fein
Lockheed Martin [LMT] believes its work on the Navy’s Acoustic Rapid Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Technology Insertion (ARCI) effort has it well positioned for the Consolidated Afloat Network Enterprise Services (CANES) competition currently underway to outfit surface ships with a single common network.
When the Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence (PEO C4I) issued its draft request for proposals (RFP) for CANES earlier this month, the organization referred to ARCI as the model the CANES program would be based on, Karen Conti, Lockheed Martin vice president for business development in San Diego, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
That model she pointed out is built on a two-year cycle for software refresh and a four-year cycle for hardware refresh.
ARCI is the program adopted by the submarine force for rapidly inserting new technology into the fleet.
“I think SPAWAR is trying to create its own program now, leveraging all the good work done in the submarine environment,” Conti said. “What we try to focus on is the business model, because that is what’s the enabler to get technology to the fleet faster, cheaper.”
ARCI is optimized for a solution around the submarine forces’ needs and desires, Eric Gruenloh, business development for CANES, told Defense Daily in the same interview.
“What you want to do is pick the model up and optimize it for SPAWAR’s needs and desires, primarily for the surface fleet, which is driving that installation set,” he said. “You would not want to pick it up, carbon copy it and drop it down. You’d want to evaluate it and optimize it for SPAWAR’s’ needs.”
CANES presents a lot of opportunities, some that mimic the way ARCI fostered collaboration, Conti added.
“What we find, this is about a sort of a different environment where there is more of a partnering…more of a collaborative environment. I think we saw that on ARCI, where it was no longer just the Navy or the U.S. government or the Navy program and the prime contractor developing a product for years and years and it completing at the end,” she said. “This is about a spiral development model that brings in a lot of innovation, so it really encourages innovative partnerships beyond the prime and government.”
In the business model there are opportunities on a biannual basis for small business, for academia, even for Navy laboratories, as well as industry primes other than the large defense firms, Conti said.
“Even some of our competitors are more than welcome to come in and play in this game because what it’s about is no longer is the prime doing everything. It’s about the prime integrating the best that industry and academia and the laboratories can offer,” she said.
But there are some underlying tenets that have to occur first, Conti noted. One example is an open systems architecture.
“That is so important because if you want to go to a biannual software update process you have to have known interfaces and software systems so that anybody can understand what the interfaces are and design to them,” she said. “You don’t just have that information on a sheet of paper hidden somewhere. [For] people to bring their best technologies forward, they have to understand the system design, they have to understand the interfaces, so that they can bring their algorithms or technologies forward and know that they will work…that they have the ability to work when applied.”
The CANES effort, Conti said, is really the shifting of the culture to a more trusted environment a more open environment, with open systems, an increased number of competitors, and then a whole peer review process. “So, again, it’s not just a system prime and Navy program office selecting the best. It’s opened up, it’s much more transparent. People feel, I think, more confident in bringing their technologies forward.
“I would say those are the key tenets, those are the things [the Navy is] trying to embed in the CANES approach. They talked about their technology insertion cycles…while they may not just copy the submarine OPTEMPO and process, they are going to leverage them and do what’s right for a wider fleet…more classes…less cookie cutter, and allow a process that will bring technology to the fleet much faster.”
For its part, one of the benefits Lockheed Martin brings is that the company has been the provider of the computing infrastructure to the Navy for more than 50 years, Conti said.
“Today we have almost 7,000 platforms of computing infrastructure across all Navy platforms, submarines and surface [ships],” she said. “Looking forward, the Navy through CANES plans to reduce a lot of the infrastructure. You [heard] that in Vice Adm. [Harry] Harris’ comments recently, that on a submarine we have over 60 networks onboard and we are compressing those through CANES. So understanding what’s out there today, understanding the road map for technology forward and how we can compress these systems onto a common computing infrastructure, and then making it scalable so if you go from a DDG to a carrier you don’t have to do a lot of re-architecting. Those are key tenets to success.”
The Navy issued the CANES RFP on April 2, and responses from industry are due June 3. The plan is to initially have two awards, then downselect to a single bidder. The process will run roughly 14 months, resulting in a downselect sometime in 2010, according to the Navy (Defense Daily, April 8).
The draft solicitation had a very significant emphasis on the use of COTS…the use of small business, Conti said. “There is a 30 percent subcontractor goal for small businesses [in the draft RFP]. I would say from my short experience with PEO C4I, they really do walk the walk in trying to get small business engaged and they have set goals…and industry responds well when that is in your evaluation criteria.”
“I can tell you one of our goals is to have to bring innovation to this program through a large amount of small business involvement, not just with the initial offer team. We have a lot of small business on our team, but through the lifecycle using the ARCI model as it gets tailored through CANES over the life of this contract,” Conti added.
This is the first in a series of articles looking at the industry response to the CANES program.