By Geoff Fein

Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Northrop Grumman [NOC], the two teams competing for the Navy’s Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES) contract, each completed a successful Preliminary Design Review (PDR) to deliver a directed approach to reduce infrastructure and increase capability across surface ship networks.

According to a Lockheed Martin spokesman, the company wrapped up its PDR in one day and the team received zero requests for actions from Space and Naval Warfare System Center, San Diego.

The Lockheed Martin team includes: General Dynamics [GD], ViaSat, Inc. [VSAT], Harris Corp. [HRS] and American Systems Corp., as well as large number of small companies that brought niche capabilities to the team (Defense Daily, March 9).

The two-day review conducted at Northrop Grumman’s CANES program office in San Diego served as a forum for the Navy, Northrop Grumman and its teammates to share technical information and ensured the Navy’s program requirements are clearly understood before entering into detailed design, the company said in a statement. The PDR and subsequent approval of the CANES design are important events leading up to the critical design review of CANES later this year, Northrop Grumman added.

“Northrop Grumman is poised to rapidly proceed into detailed design of the CANES system,” Mike Twyman, vice president of Integrated Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence Systems for Northrop Grumman’s Information Systems sector, said in a statement. “By applying the Northrop Grumman-developed Modular Open Systems Approach–Competitive (MOSA-C(tm)) process, we continue to advance a technically and financially superior solution that meets, and will evolve with, the Navy’s requirements.

Northrop Grumman’s MOSA-C(tm) is a strategic business and engineering process that realizes the lifecycle benefits of open-systems architecture and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components and software, the company said.

Applying MOSA-C(tm), the company verified “plug and play” modularity through extensive testing and demonstrated the ability of multiple COTS and open source products to meet CANES current and future requirements. The MOSA-C(tm) process ensures enduring solutions that will improve interoperability and lower the total cost of ownership.

The Northrop Grumman CANES system offers considerable cost and performance improvements over existing shipboard network designs including a modernized command, control communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) architecture with increased security and significantly reduced development, deployment and lifecycle costs.

Northrop Grumman team members contributing to the PDR include IBM [IBM] Global Business Services, as Northrop Grumman’s major technology and services partner on CANES; and small-business partners Atlas Technologies, Beatty and Company Computing, Juno Technologies, Syzygy Technologies, and CenterBeam.

Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman were awarded contracts to continue developing CANES on March 4, beating out separate entries from BAE Systems and Boeing [BA] for the indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, cost-plus- incentive-fee, cost-plus-fixed-fee and firm-fixed-price contracts (Defense Daily, March 5).

Lockheed Martin was awarded $14.9 million and Northrop Grumman received $17.4 million for the 12- to 14-month system, design and development phase (Defense Daily, March 9).

Selection of a single prime contractor to complete Low Rate Initial Production is anticipated in 2011.