We are at the AFA 2019 Air, Space & Cyber Conference, where attendance appears to be significantly higher than last year, perhaps by as much as 20% or more. It’s impressive to see so many of our armed forces keenly interested in learning about defense technologies, and to see their willingness to provide input that may lead to even more powerful solutions.

One of the hottest topics at our booth is multi-domain operations - the ability to counter and defeat a near-peer adversary capable of contesting the US in all domains (air, land, maritime, space, and cyberspace) in both competition and armed conflict. The military professionals visiting our booth are interested in learning about Mercury’s investment in the technology needed for data fusion to enable multi-domain applications at the tactical edge.

For example, our solutions help unmanned surveillance aircraft take radar, SIGINT, location and visual sensor feeds, combine them into a comprehensive picture and quickly communicate that to ground forces.

To achieve this, we integrate the latest commercial technology innovations into rugged subsystems that can perform and survive in challenging defense environments. Our solutions include AESA radar processing for fighter jets, rackmount cloud servers for ships and submarines, and mobile EW subsystems for ground vehicles. To learn more, read our white paper, Next Generation Integrated Defense Electronics Manufacturing – Deploying innovation at the speed of technology.

This morning, we hosted a breakfast for the industry’s leading trade and business media. In addition to one-on-one discussions, our guests enjoyed a lively roundtable discussion with Mercury’s Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer Stephanie Georges, Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer Didier Thibaud, and Mercury Board Member Lisa Disbrow. A key take-away was that multi-domain operations is an important focus for the Air Force and virtually every other branch of the military.  

Many vendors this year are touting open architecture systems, which is a high priority for the DoD. Mercury has always been a pioneer in open standards, leading the adoption of the OpenVPX system standard for embedded computing as an example. This leadership helped establish a robust ecosystem of technology providers which, when taken as a whole, has begun to reduce internal R&D costs and force better cost certainty within the prime contractor base and in the DoD itself. Today, there is better interoperability, cost certainty, risk mitigation, affordability, and technology innovation in part because of the rise and adoption of the OpenVPX standard.  

As our COO, Didier Thibaud explained to one visitor to our booth,

Mercury sees open standards as a path to standardizing embedded computing within defense electronics. We are now working with the industry on the Sensor Open System Architecture (SOSA) initiative, a collaborative effort with the DoD to define a modular architecture that aims to deliver significant improvements in affordability, interoperability and reduced time to market all while maintaining the performance and reliability for mission-critical applications.

Our recently announced EnterpriseSeries™ RES Aero rugged rackmount server product line captured the attention of our customers and military personnel alike. This unique solution delivers enterprise-class data center-caliber processing to compute-intensive airborne applications and is well-suited to mission computing and sensor processing applications. Its completely fanless design enables optimal performance at high altitudes, while a specialized power supply is tailored to aircraft requirements. The new RES Aero line offers a wide variety of benefits, including improved reliability, tailor-made high-speed processing, and proven performance. The RES Aero 1U server is on display this week at our booth, #126.

We’ll continue to report from the show floor. Look for our next installment tomorrow!