Air Force Awards $8.6M Digital Engineering Contract
The U.S. Department of the Air Force has awarded an $8.6 million contract to Istari Digital. The funding will establish Industry Øne, an initiative designed to improve digital engineering and accelerate digital transformation across the Defense Department.
The Industry Øne initiative aims to create a secure, vendor-neutral "Internet of Models" for the defense industry. This will allow engineers from different companies and the government to collaborate on designs and run automated tests without sharing their sensitive underlying data. Each organization will maintain control over its own data behind its own firewall. This contract builds on previous successful projects, including "Flyer Øne" and "Model Øne." Flyer Øne was a partnership with Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works to create a digital certification for the X-56A experimental aircraft. Model Øne focused on enabling collaboration across different security domains. Istari Digital's CEO is Will Roper, the former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. The company, backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, aims to address persistent challenges in defense acquisition, such as fragmented IT environments and incompatible software, that slow down the development of new capabilities. The Department of Defense has identified digital transformation as a critical priority to keep pace with adversaries. The goal is to move away from traditional document-centric acquisition processes to a more dynamic and efficient digital engineering approach. This shift is expected to detect errors earlier, reduce costly rework, and accelerate the fielding of new weapon systems.
