By Emelie Rutherford
Increased use of open-architecture technologies on Navy ships will impact industry, by both increasing competition and ensuring conpanies provide the sea service the most optimal capabilities, Navy Secretary Donald Winter said yesterday.
“I think [open architecture] does represent both a tremendous opportunity for the Navy, and a tremendous opportunity for industry to do what our nation needs,” the Navy’s outgoing civilian leader said at Defense Daily‘s Open Architecture Summit in Washington, D.C.
“I think the Navy has taken a very aggressive, forward-leaning approach to this construct, and I fully expect that in the very near future we will see some very significant augmentation of capability that’s been enabled from the use of open architecture,” he added.
Open-architecture arrangements allow technology systems to be incrementally enhanced in a short period of time and be interoperable with other systems, which is important for the Navy because it incrementally evolves its fleet of sundry ship types, he said.
Winter said “one of the objectives and one of the hopes for open architecture” is “to enhance competition and to be able to reuse the products”–which he refers to as “both importing and exporting.”
“We want to be able to, on existing systems, be able to take advantage of new technologies, new capabilities, new products that may be available from various sources,” Winter said. “Not just the source that happened to produce the original system, the original platform. We want to be able to import those capabilities, and we want to be able to integrate them into the platform without going through overly extensive integration activities.”
At the same time, he said, the Navy wants to be able to export products.
“As we’re developing a new system, we want to be able to reuse that capability on other platforms, whether of the same class or of different classes, to be able to take that capability and load it from platform to platform,” he said.
Thus, unavoidably, he said: “All of that requires us to relook, if you will, the relationship that exists between the Navy and our contracting community.”
Longterm relationships with industry “need to be based on performance and value-added, not based on barriers to entry that are artificially established to minimize competition in the long run,” he said.
“We must be in a position to leverage a broad spectrum of hardware and software developments,” he said. “We need to be able to insert best-of-breed capabilities that come from elsewhere….If we’re totally dependent upon the original developer for all future enhancements and capabilities associated with (a) system, then it becomes, quite frankly, more difficult to ensure that that system is going to be able to provide the capability that we’re looking for in the future.”
Because open architecture allows for interoperability, it helps the Navy rationalize significant expenses required for developing such systems, he said. That, he said, “goes to both enhancing the value to Navy…(and) preserving the value of the capabilities that industry provides to the Navy.”
Open architecture spurs the Navy be disciplined and structured in defining and documenting its needs and discussing requirements, he said, while also providing a supporting mechanism for sustainment of systems.
For industry, open architecture provides “some tremendous opportunities,” Winter said.
“Even though we’ve often talked about it from a standpoint from the Navy perspective–what Navy has to do and what Navy has to specify–it represents some huge opportunities for industry,” he said.
“I think it can help reestablish a proper interface between Navy and industry….And I think that all of that will go to further the joint interests that we have in hand of being able to deliver to the fleet the type of capabilities that they need for the future.”
Looking at financial stresses and other challenges, “the value of being able to provide assurance of cost-effective solutions to this critical national need I think is one of the best things that we can do for our Navy and our nation in the future,” Winter said.