George Jackson:

Hi everyone. I'm George Jackson with GovX Actv in today's five questions onsite at AUSA's annual meeting and exposition in Washington DC are with Dr. Eric Gans, business Development Director for advanced Technology and ground Platforms at Mercury Systems. Sir, welcome. Thanks for being here.

 

Eric Gans:

Thank you, George. Happy to be here.

 

George Jackson:

So let's kick off with just a foundational question about Mercury itself. From my understanding, supply chain, a big part of your portfolio. You've been called kind of the Intel inside for hundreds of defense systems. Just give our audience a little background on Mercury, who you are and how you integrate with the Army community.

Eric Gans:

Okay, great. Yeah, so Mercury is a heart of technology company. It's really focused on processing at various points in the supply chain and the platforms themselves. We provide processing at the edge and centralized processing where it's needed for mission critical applications, and we do that in a safe and secure manner. And following open standards, which is a big theme of this show, CMOs and other open standards compliance. So really we work with our customers and partners to find the proper processing solution, meeting the various needs where and where is needed in that platform.

George Jackson:

So processing safe and secure open standards. There's a lot of capability in your portfolio that applies to those areas. What are some of the capabilities you're currently providing to Army?

Eric Gans:

Yeah, as an example, we do edge processing. So we hear a lot about GPUs and the committee now to handle AI applications among others. So we have solutions that'll sit right next to the imager, for example, and provide you axial information very quickly and timely for that platform, for that operator. And really you have to work with the confines of those platforms, architectures, and other constraints to deliver that mission critical information appropriate. So edge processing is critical. One. We also have centralized processing example of some of our products behind me here. CMOs compliant mission processors that really host a variety of capabilities on that platform as a centralized processing solution as well. So really all throughout and really different types. So we support processing in the form of, you mentioned GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs among others. We do that in various form factors you can imagine on the module level, on a card level or on a full box level. It really depends on the requirements platform where we're integrating, it'll meet those needs appropriately.

George Jackson:

Ladder new acronyms on the floor here, always at A USA. One of them that we're talking about is A MCS. What is that? Explain it. How does it have to do with what Mercury builds or executes for the Army?

Eric Gans:

Got it. So thank you. That's one of our flagship programs. We'll be entering qualification on the aviation Mission common server in early 2025, so soon to be a production level item. And that's really a interesting product that we developing for PO aviation, specifically pm amsa, to support replacing the integrated data modem on those platforms with something that's essentially about 40 times the capability and open standard compliant.

 

George Jackson:

Wow. So what is that going to do for you?

 

Eric Gans:

That's really going to provide, an analogy that we've liked to use is the iPhone, for these specific platforms. Because you have such a level of processing and interfaces available, you're monitoring all the activities on that platform. You can provide DVE capability, AI threat recognition among others, and really open centered compliant allows you to load different applications and not change the box, but really bring out enhanced capabilities from that box to the operators and the platform itself.

George Jackson:

You touched on some of these themes, I'll call 'em already, but the Army is really engaged on new threats on new technologies and developments in warfare, but also providing insight services, access at the Edge, specifically talk about the edge as it applies to our conversation and where you come in.

Eric Gans:

And really there's a tremendous amount of sensors on all these platforms and what fundamental problem now, there's just too much data to be processed at a central point. So what we've done is we staggered the processing within these platforms to pull out what's critical from those individual sensors and send only the most relevant and critical information to the centralized computing platform. And that's really a requirement fundamentally because there's just too much data to move around. And we're finding the best ways to move that data appropriately, efficiently, and within the constraints platform and provide, as I say, actual information. You don't want to overwhelm the operator with all this imagery, RF data among others. And the edge processing really helps that by putting that intelligence close to the sensor. So the sensor is providing really what matters most timely and critical.

George Jackson:

In all of my conversations here at AUSA over the past decade or more, I always get a sense of the community of this group. I mean, there are tens of thousands of people here in Washington dc, but the Army's mission wouldn't advance without contributions from a lot of different players. You taught me a new term before we went on the air hardware subsystems provider. What does that mean? Does it say about your role in the defense contracting landscape?

Eric Gans:

Yeah, it's about collaboration, right? So this is a subsystem that works with a larger entity, and that's fundamentally both and software. So a lot of the things we've been working on with the community is to take existing products that we have and host new capabilities in the form of software or AI capability, for example, to really enhance what's already on that platform. A lot of these boxes and or recorders or mission processes, I have a footprint in these platforms and being open center compliant, ready to accept new capabilities. So we're always looking for other companies and collaborators to say, we have this footprint, we have this processing safe and secure capability on this platform. What other features can you integrate on there from a software perspective to increase the utility of what's already there. So rather than constantly changing out the box or upgrading it, this can be done organically through a software load or other update, for example. And that's really opening the eyes to our operators and our customers of new things that can be done with in a very timely manner.

George Jackson:

Dr. Eric Gans, business development director for advanced technology and ground platforms, mercury Systems. Sir, thanks so much. Thank you. That was today's five questions. For Exec tv, I'm George Jackson. Have a great day.