Maryland Small Business wins DoD Contract
Oct. 29, 2018, Westminster, MD – The US Army recently announced their competitive selection of Skayl, LLC to the Architect role on the Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator (JMR TD) Mission Systems Architecture Demonstration (MSAD) Capstone Project. Skayl, a Maryland-based startup with a specialized focus on rapid integration, won the contract as prime without small-business preference. The startup will be sub-contracting to Harris Corporation, a $6 billion technology and defense contractor.
The JMR TD MSAD program’s goal is to establish architectural methods, tactics, and standards for integration flexibility for avionics and other technologies, enabling emerging technologies to rapidly integrate with and operate within the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) platform. The Missions Systems Architecture can be considered a blueprint for the design specification of an aircraft and its mission system, including all its interfaces and various software and hardware components. The architecture consists of a plan, standard procedures, software, languages, and models. These elements are shared by the design teams and engineers across the various aspects of the project, in addition to the requirements and acquisitions communities.
In the Architect role, Skayl will act as independent third-party contractor, providing architectural and mission systems subject matter expertise for the research effort. Specifically, the Architect is responsible for the development of architectural products, ensuring architectural consistency, and ensuring the Mission Systems Architecture addresses Government interests in matters that impact the technical and business needs of the Government.
“The standardization of an architecture across the project represents a paradigm shift that will, in effect, ensure more efficient and effective coordination,” said Chris Allport, Skayl Co-Founder.
“Through standardization and advanced architecture approaches, the project will demonstrate increased safety and security as well as reduced costs, delays, and performance problems. It’s a major step that means significant and long-lasting improvements for Future Vertical Lift and the US Army. We look forward to the opportunity to support the government as Lead Architect, and to demonstrate the benefit of such an approach to all mission-critical systems in which rapid integration is key.”
“Elevation of architecture to an procurable item and enabling its use at the enterprise level within an acquisition community is transformative to how systems will be specified, procured, modified, and maintained throughout their lifecycle,” adds Gordon Hunt, Skayl Co-Founder. “Current approaches have an implicit architecture where one must wait until design and implementation are complete to test and evaluate. Making architecture explicit and manageable throughout the design process will yield systems that exhibit the desired traits specified by the architecture.”
Headquartered in Westminster, Maryland, Skayl was established in 2016 to focus exclusively on the problem of rapid, cost effective, high-integrity integration solutions for industries that range from the Internet of Things (IoT) to US Defense. Leveraging more than 20 years of open systems architecture expertise, Skayl continues to improve upon advanced approaches with new product solutions designed for integration across platforms and standards.
“In the defense world,” explains Sonya Hand, Skayl’s Director of Marketing and Strategy, “we’re building solutions that work seamlessly across multiple standards and modeling languages including FACE, UCS, OMS, JCA, SOSA, various NATO STANAGs, UML, SysML, and more. Right now, many of these standards overlap like a series of Venn diagrams, but we’re working to tie them all together through machine-understandable methodologies.”
The key, says Hand, is an expert understanding of the underlying principles and ensuring that the architecture and resulting models are consistently repeatable, testable, traceable, and verifiable across protocols, languages, and standards. “In this way, Skayl is helping to break vendor lock across industries and open doors to possibilities that our clients have only just started to explore.”
About Skayl
Skayl’s consulting, training and product solutions enable mass interoperability in mission-critical settings including national defense, healthcare, smart cities, transportation, and public safety. Skayl’s cutting-edge products enable rapid, cost-effective integration, with which diverse technologies share trusted real-time data so reliable that lives can depend on it. To find out more, visit www.skayl.com.