Ralph Guevarez:              

Hello, and welcome to Mercury Now, a podcast series brought to you by Mercury Systems. I am your host, Ralph Guevarez, and today we are coming to you live from the Army Aviation Mission Solution Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, where Mercury is showcasing solutions to make modular open system architecture, or MOSA, a reality for army aviation. Let's discuss why this matters, not only to army aviation, but to the Army as a whole. Joining me at this time is a return guest to the Mercury Now platform, Mr. Greg Tiedemann, product manager for Mercury's mission division. Greg, great to finally meet you in person.

Greg Tiedemann:            

It's nice to finally see you in person too, Ralph.

Ralph Guevarez:              

Thank you for being here. So Greg, there's been a lot of discussion around MOSA as it pertains to AMCS. Could you please explain to our viewers why it is so important to army aviation?

Greg Tiedemann:            

Sure. I'd be happy to. MOSA stands for modular open systems architecture, and simply put, it enables the Army to integrate advanced capabilities and get them out to the battlefield quicker and more affordably than they are today. The Army's goal with MOSA is that their environment, their multi-domain environment in the battlefield today, is constantly evolving, and MOSA enables them to get these advanced capabilities out there to address some serious operational gaps in their capabilities.

Ralph Guevarez:              

Thank you for that, Greg. Now AMCS is getting a lot of attention here at Quad A, I must say, which is fantastic.

Greg Tiedemann:            

It is.

Ralph Guevarez:              

So two part question. One, how is it going to transform army aviation? And two, how is Mercury going to take MOSA and build AMCS?

Greg Tiedemann:            

Wow, great question. Let's take a walk, and I'll show you in the booth. So Ralph, here we are at the AMCS station in the Quad A booth, and I'm going to take question number two first. How we are using MOSA in AMCS is literally ... So I talked earlier about open VPX, and open VPX enables me to use different modules from different companies as well as from Mercury. So I've got a wide range of modules that I'm using in the system from different manufacturers, as well as some that we've developed within Mercury.

So that enables me to build a computer that literally has got 20 to 40X more performance than what's out there today. The first part of the question is, how is it going to transform the Army? It's literally what I'm showing up here on the screen. If I can deliver 20 to 40 times more performance in a small form factor like this, I can replace a lot of functionality, a lot of systems on the aircraft, that are out there to deploy today.

Literally, this is about 100 pounds of hardware that they have on these helicopters today that I can replace with about 30 pounds of hardware and AMCS. So again, it goes back to question number one is that we've got to address these operational gaps with the Army and give them some more capabilities. So that's how AMCS is leveraging MOSA and what we hope to do with the Army. I'm really excited about it.

Ralph Guevarez:              

Greg, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your time. It was great having you on the show.

Greg Tiedemann:            

I really enjoyed it.

Ralph Guevarez:              

Great to meet you.

Greg Tiedemann:            

Take care.

Ralph Guevarez:              

For more information on this and all of our products, please visit mrcy.com. This is Ralph Guevarez for Mercury Now signing off.