Northrop Grumman‘s [NOC] Distributed Common Ground System-Intelligence Community (DCGS-IC) Beta Operational Capability (BOC) has become an operational Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), providing the system greater flexibility and efficiency compared to earlier intelligence networked processing systems, the company said.
Northrop Grumman developed DCGS-IC BOC in nine months as an implementation of an earlier proof-of-concept system. The DCGS-IC BOC proves that using a true SOA with commercial standards, and capitalizing on reuse, introduces new development power to the government’s toolbox, the company said. The Northrop Grumman SOA approach promises significant life cycle cost savings for upgrades and introduction of new services and capabilities, the company added.
“The DCGS-IC BOC demonstrates that Northrop Grumman’s SOA framework provides an existing solution to our country’s need for rapid, usable and timely intelligence data,” Joseph Ensor, vice president and general manager of Northrop Grumman’s space and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems division, said.
DCGS-IC is the latest in a family of DCGS systems designed to receive many types of data from a wide variety of intelligence sources, access the data in different ways as needed, and make it available to multiple user communities accurately and efficiently. DCGS-IC is designed to serve the U.S. national intelligence agencies and tactical DCGS military units by providing decision makers, intelligence analysts and warfighters with single-user log-on access to a variety of authoritative data sources from across the national and tactical communities, according to Northrop Grumman. The system draws upon data sources at the agencies and the military services, including those linked by other DCGS systems.
The DCGS-IC BOC entered operation in November 2008. The DCGS-IC baseline provides a reusable services architecture so, as legacy systems are broken down into value-added services, these services now have an established framework on which to land, saving time and money, Northrop Grumman added.
DCGS-IC offers much faster gathering of relevant information than previous systems. Its advantages include: (1) web browser-based aggregated information search and access; (2) single-user log-in combined with a federated query across a number of authoritative data sources; (3) Multi-INT visualization on a single web-based 2D chart or map and/or a Google [GOOG] Earth 3D display; (4) interoperability with U.S. intelligence authoritative data sources; and (5) streamlined access to intelligence data. Searches that formerly took hours can now be done within minutes, according to the company..
Northrop Grumman’s SOA framework was developed specifically for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) collection, processing, exploitation and dissemination, and uses commercially-available hardware and software that comply with Department of Defense and commercial standards. The system incorporates the DCGS Integration Backbone in addition to a Net Centric Enterprise Services compliant content discovery service, the company added.
DCGS-IC BOC leverages the SOA framework developed for DCGS-Army (DCGS-A). The Army is using this common SOA framework to host capabilities from a variety of legacy “stovepiped” systems as they are adapted to become components of newly evolving applications and services. Northrop Grumman is also re-using key components of the company’s SOA architecture in other intelligence systems. This adaptable framework provides less start-up time and less-costly solutions to other U.S. intelligence requirements. Northrop Grumman has invested five years of research and development and leveraged more than $100 million worth of architecture, design, testing and real-world operations into the SOA framework used in DCGS- IC, DCGS-A and other systems, according to Northrop Grumman.