By Geoff Fein

The Navy yesterday awarded Lockheed Martin [LMT] $14.9 million and Northrop Grumman [NOC] $17.4 million contracts for the Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES) system, a directed approach to reduce infrastructure and increase capability across surface ship networks.

The two companies beat 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.

“These contracts were awarded to design, develop and deliver a CANES engineering development model consisting of hardware and associated operating systems, virtualization and commercial software needed in a functional network. Following system development, a down-select evaluation will be conducted to choose the best value to produce Low Rate Initial Production units, Full Rate Production units, associated provisioned items and engineering support services,” according to Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR).

The government has addressed certification and accreditation efforts, fleet introduction preparations, early adopter installations on the USS Lincoln Strike Group (CVN- 72) and other afloat platforms as risk mitigation efforts and to further define requirements. All these activities are designed to maximize the potential for success of both system development teams by mitigating potential sources of risk. The government plans to select to a single system developer in late 2011, according to SPAWAR.

CANES is an important award for Lockheed Martin, Jack Papp, a Lockheed Martin spokesman, said.

“It leverages our extensive experience on the Q-70 program where we delivered 7,000 ruggedized shipboard computing units to the U.S. Navy,” he said. “These units are currently deployed on all classes of ships and submarines as well as at shore facilities. Our experience, combined with a diverse industry team, enables us to provide the Navy with a low- risk, affordable solution for rapid capability delivery to the warfighter.”

Northrop Grumman is very pleased and proud to support the Navy on this vital modernization effort, Michael Twyman, vice president of Integrated Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence Systems, said.

“Our team has developed an innovative, cost-effective concept we believe will provide the foundational infrastructure and the secure, reliable and interoperable networks the Navy requires for full maritime domain awareness,” Twyman said. “Our approach focuses on providing required C4ISR infrastructure capabilities at minimal total ownership cost by applying the Northrop Grumman-developed Modular Open Systems Approach-Competitive(tm) (MOSA-CTM) process, an enduring, vendor- and product-neutral, model-based architecture that leverages our in-depth knowledge and domain experience across the Navy.”

For its part, Boeing said it was disappointed by the news.

“The Boeing team is disappointed by today’s announcement that the U.S. Navy did not select it to produce the Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services prototype. We look forward to meeting with the customer to better understand their decision,” Nancy-Kim Yun, director of Integrated Shipboard Systems, told Defense Daily.

BAE did not respond by press time.

The goal of CANES is to consolidate and replace numerous legacy systems and deliver an open, common network to every ship, submarine and shore-based command and control center in the Navy. A subprogram of CANES, Afloat Core Services, decouples development of software so that it is modular, reusable and interoperable and can be updated more quickly and frequently (Defense Daily, June 5).