Digital Battlespace
AFCEA West 2012: CANES winner to be announced next week
A military official has confirmed that the winning bidder for the next stage of the US Navy's Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES) programme will be announced next week.
Navy Capt D.J. LeGoff, programme manager for navy tactical networks told a media briefing at the AFCEA West conference in San Diego, on 25 January that an announcement will be made on or before 1 February.
The decision will involve the navy making a down selection on a design between the two remaining vendors, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and the vendor behind the winning design will be awarded a two year design contract.
In 2014 a full four year deployment contract will be awarded, for which anybody can bid, and an request for proposals for this will be released at the end of this year, LeGoff confirmed.
'I'm trying to get the best contract for the government,' he continued. 'We know we have the industrial capacity to do this, and we're really trying to reduce the workload for the operators and users.'
The programme involves the development of an integrated modern shipboard computing system for the US Navy and US Marine Corps
Lockheed Martin delivered its model to the government in December, and confirmed that it has been through the critical design review. ‘We are confident our CANES design will meet the Navy's requirements,’ Joseph Bulger, Senior Manager for Navy Networks at the company told Shephard.
'What we've done for our CANES solution is focus on a couple of areas they [the government] need,' Joe Villani, President of CANES for Lockheed Martin’s Mission Systems & Sensors business told Shephard.
'Our approach was to take a complex solution and make it easy to use,' he continued, and said that the company has focused on its previous experience with the navy to provide a suitable bid that is easy to install, diagnose and repair.
'We've spent 60 years plus providing C4I to the Navy. We understand the environment these systems have to be in.'
He said that one of the primary requirements for the navy with regards to this programme was to be able to be deployed rapidly and to be able to support multiple applications in a quicker way.
This sentiment was reiterated by LeGoff, who said that the direction from navy leadership was to 'field as fast as you can', and 'while you do that try to prioritise the older systems first; it's the baselines that are ten years old that I'm keen to update.'
'We made assumptions in our cost model for CANES,' LeGoff said of the integration costs. 'It costs me almost as much to install this as it does to buy it.'
Northrop Grumman refused to comment on the programme.
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