Industry Interview: Mercury Computer Systems Inc.

TISR 2011 Volume: 1 Issue: 3 (September)

Q: What is Mercury’s position on defense acquisition reform?

A: One of Mercury’s defense prime contractor customers recently described defense acquisition reform as a game changer. And that’s hard to argue. Nearly every program is now in competition, and naturally, affordability is a major factor in DoD decision-making. That means primes have to manage their costs and their supply chain more closely.

These days, so much of a program’s content is contributed by subcontractors—often as much as 80 percent. So primes are pressuring subs to reduce margins and pass on supply chain savings.

Fixed-price contracts also increase the program risk for the primes, and they’re expecting their subcontractors to share that risk. Program development timelines is another issue.

At Mercury, we understand that our customers need program accountability from their subcontractors. We work meticulously at every level of a program to ensure success— and that includes assuming some of the business risk faced by our customers.

Q: How does Mercury support defense prime contractors?

A: Mercury’s been providing rugged, realtime, high performance embedded computing subsystems for over 30 years. We’ve worked with every large prime contractor on their most critical programs, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Atomics, Argon, Harris, BAE, and General Dynamics. In fact, Mercury has been deployed in over 300 defense programs.

We support high-visibility naval programs such as Aegis, where we provide the signal processing subsystem embedded within the Aegis ballistic missile defense radar. On ground-mobile platforms, we’ve provided the processing subsystems for multiple generations of the Patriot missile defense system. And we’re on airborne platforms as well, including Predator, Global Hawk, JSF and Reaper.

Over the past several years, we’ve been responding to the needs of our prime contractor customers by expanding our business focus. We’ve moved from being a technology vendor to being a solutions partner for our primes, investing in development and sharing risk with them.

In terms of what we deliver, it’s more than just embedded multicomputing. It’s robust ISR subsystems that help our customers speed their time to deployment.

Q: How can you help with the challenges of defense acquisition reform?

A: First, there’s the increased use of firm-fixed price contract awards—that’s a huge challenge for the primes because it shifts risk from the government to them. Mercury can help by assuming that part of the risk associated with our subsystems.

The second action is the shift toward shorter program timelines. The government wants the primes to deliver more capability, and do it faster than ever. The old development model was three years of research, five years of development and 15 years of production. The government now wants the primes to deliver new war fighting capability in 12- and 18-month upgrade spirals. Again, Mercury can help by delivering what we call application ready subsystems [ARS] to the primes.

The third challenge is the use of more open systems architectures. To meet today’s technical demands, well designed modules are not sufficient—solutions must be designed at a subsystem level. You can’t just take COTS commodity catalog products, put them together into a chassis and expect it to solve the problems—that’s not how you create a viable open systems architecture. Mercury provides experience and expertise in designing real, high-performance architectures that are based on open standards.

Q: What steps have you taken to deliver this additional value to your customers?

A: Several years ago, we formed a services and systems integration (SSI) group, which functions as a real-time extension of a prime contractor’s internal engineering resources. SSI helps customers design, develop and deploy the application ready subsystems that are uniquely suited for their needs.

Composed of the best engineering experts at Mercury, the SSI team works on dozens of subsystems each year, leveraging their deep experience to accelerate the design and development phases. Our prime customers get access to these highly skilled individuals to augment their development teams without adding to fixed staff costs.

At a business level, SSI structures its contracts in ways that share risk with the primes—with contractual options that are tailored for specific program conditions.

Q: What is an application ready subsystem?

A: An application ready subsystem provides a true jumpstart to the development process. Each ARS is a customizable configuration, designed for a specific application area—EW, radar, EO/IR or C4I. What makes it customizable is an efficient building-block design. Every component is evaluated and chosen as a best-of-breed choice—whether it’s furnished by the customer, Mercury or a third party. Of course, every ARS is optimized for both performance and to meet SWaP constraints.

The building-block components are integrated into a preconfigured and pre-tested subsystem, ready for an application without re-spin, redesign or guesswork. That’s a major timesaver.

Because they’re application specific, each ARS serves as an advanced starting point, ready for the primes’ ISR application saving time and valuable resources. So you’re already well on the way to a final solution. And it’s not just a hardware configuration either, but all the necessary system software and middleware, supporting scalable, portable applications. ♦

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