On April 20, McLean, VA-based Booz Allen Hamilton announced that the firm was selected by the Army Futures Command’s Command, Control, Computers, Communications, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) Center to serve as the primary developer of its Rainmaker solution.
Rainmaker is a common data fabric that will enable currently incompatible systems across joint mission spaces to seamlessly share, secure and synchronize data required to coordinate complex combat operations. The solution is a foundational layer for the Department of Defense’s Joint All Domain Command & Control (JADC2) concept that will enable data sharing across all U.S. military domains including land, sea, air, space and cyberspace.
“We are proud to have been selected to develop Rainmaker, a critical program that supports all four of the Army’s mission areas – from the Warfighter Mission Area to the Enterprise Information Environment Mission Area,” said Michael Davenport, a senior vice president at Booz Allen and leader of the firm’s C5ISR business. “This program will further strengthen the Army’s ability to harness data and information to achieve tactical, operational and strategic objectives across multi-domain operations, and facilitate future modernization efforts like those envisioned by JADC2. The development being done on this program is emblematic of why it is critical to fuse deep, technical knowledge with mission expertise to win on the future battlefield.”
As the prime contractor for this award, Booz Allen will apply its diverse expertise in software development, data engineering, DevSecOps, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud computing to create a data fabric based on an open systems architecture and common standards so that data is easily discoverable, accessible, synchronized and secured across the Department of Defense. The firm will provide a range of state-of-the-art data services including a distributed cloud architecture; a unified and harmonized cross-functional data store that includes structured, unstructured, semi-structured and binary data; an advanced analytics framework that supports capabilities including machine learning; and APIs that use open standards to enable existing and new programs to ingest both batch and streaming, high-velocity data.
“Rainmaker will form one of the pillars of the Pentagon’s JADC2 vision as well as the foundation on which the Army and others can build a wide array of AI services to improve decision making on and off the battlefield,” said Gus Taveras, senior executive advisor in the firm’s defense market. “Booz Allen has both the mission understanding and deep technical expertise needed to help the Army build a solution that can quickly assess, share and secure voluminous tactical data—from satellites and central databases to individual aircraft, vehicles and frontline troops—to help warfighters across all U.S. military services make rapid, informed decisions.”
Source: Booz Allen
By Loren Blinde
April 21, 2021
