Lockheed Martin [LMT] has increased sales of its Cross Domain Solutions products since placing them on the U.S. General Services Administration’s (GSA) Schedule of products and services, a government contract vehicle focused solely on procuring goods and services.
Lockheed Martin Business Development Manager John Beck told Defense Daily yesterday the company roughly doubled what it would have sold without being on the GSA Schedule because it has been able to complete transactions “far more rapidly” than previously.
“So a couple sales a month have resulted, for sure, out of the GSA Schedule work that, I don’t think, we would have received half of that before,” Beck said.
Beck credited the GSA Schedule for easing customer access to federal acquisition process, which he characterized as having never been labeled as simple, fast and easy to use.
Lockheed Martin’s Cross Domain Solutions allow data to be exchanged across all security domains by users with different levels of clearance, according to a company statement. Lockheed Martin uses standard protocols to integrate cross-domain information flows into customer systems without modifying existing standards-based communications software.
More than 150 data types are fully supported for the automatic exchange of data and new data types are added regularly as customers realize the potential of automated sanitization and sharing. Systems can be tailored to guard, sanitize, transliterate and/or reformat information.
Beck said sometimes customers will have a format that is used both at the top secret classification and one used at secret. Beck said Cross Domain Solutions can literally re-map the fields and move them.
“Let’s say field 3 of a 10 field report is always top secret, it will never let field 3 go down to the secret level, it will always pull it out,” Beck explained. “That’s kind of the generalized way guards have worked for a long time.”
Another Lockheed Martin product similar to Cross Domain Solutions is Trusted Manager (TMAN). TMAN secures data exchange among attached entities by applying rule-sets based on classification hierarchies, sender and receiver identities, transfer protocols, data types, message formats and individual content items. TMAN is currently deployed throughout the Air Force’s Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS), which produces intelligence information collected by the U-2 spy plane and the RQ-4 Global Hawk, MQ-9 Reaper and MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).