Since the middle of the last decade the Amazon region of Brazil, which covers 1.5 million square miles, has been monitored by a complex network of air traffic control, sensors and telecommunications systems.
The System for the Vigilance of the Amazon (SIVAM) includes more than 60 radar installations – whether fixed, mobile or airborne – and 900 other sites from which data is collected. This is transmitted to four big control centres using a mix of satellite communications, point-to-point radio links and fibre-optic cabling. The whole system serves numerous purposes including environmental monitoring, protection of reserves for indigenous people, border control and policing.
Someone who was closely involved in the design and installation of the telecoms aspect of SIVAM is Marcelo Cavalvanti, technology director of Raytheon’s Network Centric Systems business. This US company was the prime developer of the whole system. Cavalvanti was one of several specialists hired specifically for the project, which marked a radical departure for the company. Although Raytheon already had substantial activities in certain niche civilian markets – not least for the type of air traffic control systems that formed part of SIVAM – it was still primarily a defence contractor.
Cavalvanti says he was aware that the project was not just challenging in technical and logistical terms, but also represented the company’s biggest contract for civil purposes. “It was unusual,” he says.
He became aware that the company’s previous experience as a defence contractor contributed to its ability to tackle the project, he says. He highlights the complexity of the overall system – it is a “system of systems”, by which he means that information from around 2,000 types and points of input is collated and used simultaneously to support end applications. “Data from all these sources is combined and merged and used for a single purpose,” he says.
Systems of this sort are typically found in the military arena. Cavalvanti says the company’s experience of working to military standards, with the rigorous regime of repeated progress reviews demanded, proved highly pertinent.
Even a small, apparently localised change to one element of the system can have major downstream implications, he says. So there is a need for constant liaison with all the parties involved – whether customers or subcontractors – to ensure that a proposed change produces the desired effect. To make the whole thing work, “everything has to be looked at from a systems aspect”, he says.
Raytheon is not the only North American defence giant to notice that its skills and knowledge base may be capable of wider application – particularly in areas with implications for environmental and energy-related concerns. That much is evident from the job title of Rick Ohlemacher, director of the energy and environment initiative of Northrop Grumman Information Systems.
The initiative has existed for five years, says Ohlemacher, and comprises a team of individuals with a brief to investigate how the company’s capabilities in areas such as sensors and data processing can be harnessed for multiple applications. It is not, he says, a “business unit”, but instead has a broader remit to focus on new ways of harnessing the sort of “big data” that the operation is used to dealing with.
An example cited by Ohlemacher of the type of contract this may lead to is a programme with the Virginia Information Technology Agency to enable data sharing and enhanced security across 80 state organisations. A single statistic that sums up the size of the task is that in 2012 no fewer than 668 million email messages were identified by the system as spam and blocked from reaching employees’ in-boxes.
Ohlemacher says the project illustrates how the sharing of data between different state agencies that it facilitates can enhance the provision of services. He, too, describes the approach as “system of systems”, adding: “This is the way society is developing.”
Another of Ohlemacher’s observations neatly encapsulates what is, perhaps, the essential attribute of a company such as Northrop Grumman – it does not regard itself as some narrowly focused defence company but as one that has a much broader set of competences that are relevant to a wider customer base.
“We are a global security company with a lot of our work in defence,” he says. But security, he argues, now has to be viewed as much more than defence against conventional military threats. It now encompasses a range of other issues – “economic security, public health, critical infrastructure protection” – all of which lend themselves to the type of approach that a company such as Northrop Grumman is used to taking. “A straightforward instance is the use of the company’s Global Hawk unmanned surveillance aircraft for non-military tasks,” says Ohlemacher. “Following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, for example, it flew photographic assessment missions over the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant.”
An organisation that regards itself as a facilitator for such changes is UK company Dynamixx, which was set up by former defence industry analyst Nick Cook. He became convinced of the potential for what he calls ADS – aerospace, defence and security – companies to diversify into new markets, he says. So in 2008 he took the plunge and set up his own business to help them do so.
He felt that the biggest areas of opportunity were energy and environmental efficiency. They both involve a need to operate in a wide range of different and often hostile environments. “ADS companies deploy their technologies everywhere, from the deep ocean to earth orbit,” he says.
Such companies are also used to dealing with governments, and energy and the environment are increasingly high on the list of priorities for politicians, says Cook.
Ohlemacher says that environmental issues and the protection of large-scale energy installations can have security implications, so there is a degree of synergy between ADS companies and governments in this area.
It is only since the second half of the past decade, says Cook, that ADS companies have started to look with intensity at the opportunities that might be available to them. This process had nothing to do with their capabilities and everything to do with attitude. “It wasn’t that they didn’t have the technologies, but that they didn’t have the impetus.”
To cope with the increased involvement with other private-sector organisations that such diversification entails, companies had to adopt a new business model, says Cook. The methodology that had come to characterise the defence procurement process was that of the “request for proposal”, in which bids would be invited to satisfy sets of performance specifications for intended products, he says. Initial proposals would then typically be whittled down to perhaps just two, from which more detailed bids would be developed. Given that defence contracts often carry a considerable upfront burden of research and development, cost was not necessarily a determining factor.
In contrast, Cook says: “In the commercial world, companies may decide to carry a loss in the early years of a contract.” This disparity was, he says, a big disincentive for at least some of the global ADS companies, such as Raytheon, BAE Systems, Finmeccanica, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Saab, Thales, Boeing and EADS, although he concedes that the last two are also major players in civil aviation. But he is confident that any inhibitions such companies may have had about becoming involved in non-defence markets have evaporated. “We are on the cusp of that transition,” he says.
Another giant of the ADS industry that is making deliberate efforts to move into the non-defence area is Swedish company Saab. Carl-Johan Koivisto, head of new business initiatives, says this took concrete form four years ago with the inception of Greentech, which he describes as a “workshell” organisation within the company. Its aim was to identify capabilities within the company that had the potential for direct application or adaptation to non-defence markets.
Three new areas were identified: renewable energy, green buildings and transport. Koivisto says that Saab’s reasoning was in part derived from obvious synergies with previous work. Targeting energy-efficient buildings, for instance, was a logical extension of the company’s involvement in the provision of underground facilities for the Swedish military. “We’ve been doing that for 30 years,” he says.
He adds that Saab regards itself as more than simply a manufacturer of defence hardware. “We see ourselves as being very much a technology-driven company working with information and telecommunications,” he says. As such, the company’s expertise in a range of generic technological areas – control, monitoring and security – all seemed to have the potential for broader application.
No single factor triggered the company’s decision to explore new areas, although Koivisto says that it had become aware of the reports of the accelerated melting of the Arctic ice sheet and recognised that this had more than just immediate environmental implications. One consequence could be the opening up of new transport routes. These would be particularly arduous and would pose challenges for the provision of effective search and rescue services.
Right now, though, the company has two projects under way that provide real examples of its determination to use its existing technology base to create non-ADS market opportunities. The first derives from Saab’s identification of the effective management of urban environments – the “attractive city” concept – as an ideal application area for its technological competences.
Koivisto says Saab has recognised that modern cities rely on networks of information for their efficient operation in areas such as traffic, utilities and waste management but that these are generally not integrated with each other, so valuable opportunities for synergistic use of data between different areas can be lost. Saab’s expertise in military command-and-control systems lends itself to helping find ways to achieve this objective, although, he says, the appropriate terminology for a civilian context is “decision support”.
The company is developing prototype systems for installation in two cities, one in Sweden and one in Latin America, by the end of next year. They will aim, says Koivisto, not just to integrate multiple information flows but also to facilitate the distribution of data from the “cooperation centre” at the core out to the population of the cities by diverse means, including the internet, mobile phones and social media.
The second project is of a different order – it aims to develop not a system but a robot that can be used to clean the submerged hulls of ships of the marine growth adhering to them that causes drag and increases fuel consumption. The project, which is being carried out by a subsidiary called Saab Seaeye, again builds on an existing capability the company has in developing submarine remotely operated vehicles. But in this case, says Koivisto, the objective is to develop a completely autonomous machine that can do the job itself – there will be no control cable, only a flexible pipe to carry away the material removed from the ship.
The idea for the machine came from contact between Saab and civilian harbour authorities that it consulted as part of the “attractive city” initiative. The process therefore illustrates one of the issues that he says confronts a company such as Saab when attempting to diversify – that of building new networks.
Another issue, adds Koivisto, is “thinking about financial solutions from the very beginning” – in other words, being commercially competitive. But purchasing patterns in the defence sector have been moving in that direction in any case, he says, so all the activities involved are in large part an evolutionary development of the company’s core operations.