By Geoff Fein
The Navy last week issued its anticipated request for proposals (RFP) for the Consolidated Afloat Network Enterprise Services (CANES), a directed approach to reduce infrastructure and increase capability across surface ship networks.
The RFP is for the common computing environment, the infrastructure piece of CANES, said Chris Miller, program executive officer for command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (PEO C4I).
Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) had been working since January to issue the RFP, but the huge number of responses following several industry days led PEO C4I to review the feedback and delay the RFP.
“We got more feedback and comments than we were expecting, so obviously it took us a littler bit longer than we were expecting,” Miller said. “It actually made the product better and we are really pleased.”
Miller noted the office had received more than 1,200 questions and comments from the five industry days. “I really think that was critical. That gave us a lot more feedback, a lot more insight. The more we get feedback from industry and other people, the better off we are going to be.”
Additionally, CANES went through an Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) peer review.
“We had an OSD peer review…obviously we had folks from AT&L and the other services come help us, but we also went through some internal things where we had some of our internal senior folks inside Team SPAWAR look at the contract as well,” he added.
Responses to the RFP, which went out April 2, are due June 3. The plan is to initially have two awards, then downselect to a single bidder, Miller said. The process will run roughly 14 months, resulting in a downselect sometime in 2010, he added.
A number of defense companies are working on CANES efforts, including Boeing [BA], BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin [LMT], Northrop Grumman [NOC], and Raytheon [RTN].
The first increment, Miller said, is focused on the Navy getting its arms around today’s information technology (IT) networks afloat.
“Today we have a series of networks, so this first piece is really getting our arms around that and providing it in such a way as to increase the availability…make it more sustainable, those kind of critical drivers we are undertaking with our program,” he said.
“In the future, we are starting to work with our resource sponsor at OPNAV on an Increment II of the program that will provide the total shipboard IT networking infrastructure,” Miller said. “But we want to be careful here that we do it right…that we get the requirements understood and we are able to build a program to basically meet all those additional requirements [that we are after] in a total shipboard environment.”
Future growth areas that will go into future increments of the program include Hull, Mechanical and Electrical networks, reactor land network and shipboard control networks, Miller added.
One of the things the Navy strove for was to have an open architecture (OA) approach. So one of the key tenets about the CANES architecture was separation of the software from the hardware.
“We are going to have a separate RFP for our software, and, additionally, that RFP is going to be designed to be way more collaborative and open and incentivize small business so we can get the best stuff from our industry and government partners in the future,” Miller said.
Miller pointed out that PEO C4I is following a model similar to the submarine program’s Acoustic Rapids Commercial-off-the-shelf Insertion (ARCI) effort.
That should maximize competition as well as minimize the overall integration risk for the program, Miller added.
PEO C4I also had a risk mitigation effort with the USS Lincoln (CVN-72) Strike Group. “We are taking our current backbone network from the fleet today and we are doing some risk mitigation efforts on some of the key technologies, virtualization, some of the wireless, some SOA stuff,” he said.
Besides the Lincoln, the USS Cape St. George (CG-71) and the USS Shoup (DDG-86) participated in the risk mitigation effort, Miller said.
Those risk mitigation efforts will begin this summer, Miller added, to make sure those things actually work in an operational environment
“Because one of the most important things is we deliver this program on schedule and cost, so we are trying to be as creative as we can to make sure we are really burning down the technical risk for the program,” he said.
CANES will first go into legacy systems currently in operation, Miller said. “I don’t think that’s going to be a huge technical challenge.”
“In fact what we are seeing with some of these consolidation efforts like CANES, we are actually going to…[clean] up the network. We will be helping the ships because we will be taking away rack space, and helping them with power issues as we consolidate the infrastructure,” he said.
“Obviously, there is a lot of engineering we are going to have to go through, but the majority of the first part of this program in Increment I is really focused on the backfit of our existing fleet today,” Miller added. “The majority of fielding is focused on retrofitting today’s fleet.”
PEO C4I is also working with the new ship platforms, but that is going to take time, Miller said. “It is something we will work over the next few years. Our focus is really to hit the operational fleet today.”
The second piece, focusing on legacy applications, will be done on a case-by-case basis, Miller explained.
“Some programs are pretty easy. We have had great success in moving some legacy programs…current applications like the Naval Tactical Command Support System and the Global Command and Control System, over fairly easily,” he said. “But then there are some [that are] much more complicated that we are having to spend more time [on]. We are kind of handling those on a case-by-case [basis]. But today we have not seen an application that we cannot handle, or figure out how to engineer, to get inside of the architecture.”