Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/196923
I inside industry Innovation centre gives Ottawa firm an edge on NATO program The EDGE Innovation Centre has played a pivotal role in helping one small Ottawa company break into the international market. In August, the General Dynamics Canada centre was the setting for a contract award to Omniglobe Solutions, which will assist GDC in its support of the NATO Global Hawk program. In January, GDC was contracted by Northrop Grumman to provide ground stations for the NATO Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) program, ensuring information from the high altitude, long endurance unmanned system reaches decisions makers and commanders at deployed headquarters and the main Global Hawk operating base in Sigonella, Italy. Omniglobe will provide a software-based internal communication and recording system for the ground stations. The Ottawa start up exemplifies what the EDGE network is all about. The Ottawa centre is one of 14 across the U.S. and U.K. that brings together small and medium-sized innovative companies, large manufacturers, academics and government researchers to address complex problems. "It's a perfect example of how the EDGE network and two companies in Ottawa can take a capability built here by Canadians into the international market," said Chris Pogue, GDC's vice president of Land and Joint Solutions. Col (Ret'd) Bryan Righetti, a Board advisor with Omniglobe, said that while the contract is not the company's first, it is the most "prestigious, high profile and international." "We're a small company, but we've been able to develop an innovative and powerful product. We've developed a communications and collaborative based system that will work in mobile facilities like aircraft, ships or vehicles, or command centres. And we have challenged the paradigm that traditional systems are based on hardware. [Our's is ] all software. That has allowed us to make it more flexible, to use less power, to use less space, for example. That means it is less expensive in capital and logistics support costs." He credited both the EDGE network and Invest Ottawa for helping the company find its footing. Invest Ottawa was created last year to carry on the work of the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation, and already has 1,900 technology entrepreneurs, many in the defence sector, drawing on it for advice, mentorship and other support. Earlier this year, the EDGE centre hosted an event to help SMEs understanding how to successfully expand into new markets. The event focused on how to accelerate international growth through collaboration with EDGE industry and academic members, and support the "Canada First" initiative laid out in the 2013 Jenkins report, which noted the importance of emerging markets like India, Brazil, Turkey and South Africa for the defence sector. The centre plans to help create trade missions to international markets and assist business development efforts at specific international trade shows. A new standard for simulated terrain If you own multiple simulation systems, you probably own multiple versions of terrain software, and not all of them are compatible. In September, Montreal-based Presagis, created in 2007 as an offshoot of CAE, released M&S Suite 13, a major upgrade to its modelling and simulation software portfolio. Among the notable features is the ability to standardize terrain across a range of simulators. "One of our military customer standardized the terrain for all their divisions 8 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2013 www.vanguardcanada.com on our tool," explained Stéphane Blondin, vice president of product management and marketing. "They came to the realization that when they buy an aircraft simulator, it comes with terrain, when they buy a naval simulator, it comes with terrain, a ground training or mission rehearsal systems comes with terrain – they keep buying the same terrain over and over and at different levels of detail and different levels of complexity. "One of the key technologies underneath Suite 13 is a terrain standard which we call CDB, or common data base. With CDB, you can have all of these levels of detail co-existing in the same database – somebody flying two miles up and somebody driving on the ground. It allows us to model large, complex systems with multiple layers of information. People spend a lot of time fine tuning the database, so this is one central database that can be used by all of their functions that they can evolve over time." For military clients, the common standard and ability to show detail from a variety of systems in one common operating picture means users can always access an up-to-date 3D model map. The new suite also allows customers to present terrain as it would appear through different sensors or from different vantage points such as an aircraft or a vehicle, and as it would react to conditions such as wind, heat and water. Blondin said the company also worked to better integrate its M&S products. "One of the challenges we kept hearing from customers was that they had issues understanding which version of our visualization tools to use with which version of our simulation engine, with which version of our database tools. Customers were also using their own products with somebody else's viz engine, with somebody else's sim engine. "A lot of the money is spent in the industry on gluing stuff together, and we wanted to be better than the rest of our competition at pre-gluing those pieces together so that our customers could be more effective and more rapid at building applications." Lockheed Martin Canada hires former NATO commander Charles Bouchard was once the centre of a celebration on Parliament Hill to mark the end of the Canadian mission in Libya. Last month, the retired lieutenant-general, who received a Meritorious Service Cross for commanding the NATO-led air campaign over Libya, joined Lockheed Martin Canada. That new mission will put him once again on the Hill, arguing on behalf of several of Lockheed Martin's largest programs, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Bouchard, who will report directly to Pat Dewar, executive vice-president of Lockheed Martin International, "will assume leadership of the portfolio of Lockheed Martin activities in Canada and will be the corporation's lead representative in country," the company said in a release. "Bouchard's appointment is a result of Lockheed Martin International's focus on providing customers with direct access to the company's broad range of products and solutions." Bouchard retired in April 2012 after more than 37 years in the Royal Canadian Air Force.