Project Convergence (Podcast Transcript)

                      [01:12] Richard C. Howard: Hey, guys, Richard here with government sales momentum. Thanks for listening. Today we're going to pivot a little bit from strategy for how to influence requirements and find opportunities to actually talking about a couple of opportunities. And one opportunity within the Department of Defense falls under something called JADC2. Now you may have heard of this before, you may know a little bit about it or maybe you're hearing it for the first time, but JADC2 stands for Joint All Domain Command and Control. And really what that Equates is, joint means multiple services. So think Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines, etc. When two services work together, we usually refer to that as joint. And when we're talking about all domain Command and control, what we're really getting after with this is we want to connect information that is available to all of the war-fighters, right? So if you look at the past decades as we've built up different computer systems and networks, we have repositories of information all over the place that don't speak to each other.

                     You may be familiar with F 22 and F 35 had data links that were incompatible, essentially. Well, that's just an example of two systems that the government has built that don't communicate with each other the way they should. And in today's environment where so much information available, we realize that we have got to be able to connect everything. When I say connect, I mean sensor to shooter. So we have things that are flying in space, in the air, we have antennas, we have things on the ground. We have storage systems that need to all communicate with each other, transfer data. And one of the challenges of this is you have some users that are at the strategic level, the senior leaders, and this is Department of Defense related. So they need to have a big picture understanding of the mission that they're trying to conduct. So they require one set of information, whereas down at the bottom, the tactical user, the guy maybe flying the aircraft or soldier on the ground, he requires a different set of information that he can action. So it's how do we get the right information to the right people. So it's a very complicated problem to solve because we need to make everything communicate with each other and then we need a way once it does communicate with each other and providing the right information to the right people. And that's oversimplifying this. Grossly but that's the big picture of what JADC2 is on the Air Force.

                     You may have heard of things like ADMs advanced Battle Management system in the army. Project Convergence. But what we're going to talk about today is specific to Project Convergence because there is an opportunity for companies out there that have technologies that could enable JADC2 to get that in front of the right people at the army and let them potentially make a decision to conduct some research or go on contract to do something else. So maybe prototyping or some type of development work. So I'm going to share my screen with you. I'm going to show you a little bit about what the Project Convergence website looks like and what some of the requirements are. All right guys, if you're watching the video, you can see I have the Army Futures Command website up. If you're listening to this in the podcast, that's fine because I'm going to read you what's going on here. But basically this is a website that tells you a little bit about what Project Convergence is and how you can make a submission. Now this is Armyfuturescommand.com and it says right underneath that project Convergence is the joint force experimenting with speed, range and decision dominance to achieve over, match and inform the joint war fighting concept and joint all domain command and control jets, a campaign of learning. It leverages a series of joint multi domain engagements to integrate AI robotics, autonomy to improve battlefield essay situational awareness, connect sensors with shooter, and accelerate the decision-making timeline. And then it has a little tagline at the bottom of that. All that to say we are trying to connect all of the sensors, all of the information that's out there and get the right info to the right decision maker at the right time, whether that's a strategic guy on the top or a tactical guy or gal on the bottom trying to execute the mission.

                     Now beneath that we have Project Convergence 2022 Solution submission technology areas, essentially. So if you're a company that has a technology that can enable some of this and it's very broad right, then I would encourage you to at least investigate this website and see if maybe you're submitting your solution. See if it catches the eye of somebody that's going to be on the other side. In this case the army that says. Hey. This is a technology that we might be able to use to enable the war-fighter. Now, some of the technology collaboration areas are sensor affects both kinetic and non kinetic JADC2, which is command and control. And it says, Maneuver fires Intel protection. EW stands for electronic warfare, that's electromagnetic spectrum, manipulating, identifying things on the ground, etc. Communications SATCOM aerial and terrestrial assured PNT. PNT is position, navigating and timing. So navigation and timing. So if you are involved with navigation at all, with infused for instance, or celestial navigation or any type of navigational technology that doesn't involve GPS, this might be something that you can look at. Robotics, AI machine learning, medical sustainment autonomy. Cloud computing, planning. You can tell there are a lot of areas here, so it's very broad. So if you are doing anything that fits within that, I would definitely take a look at this Cloud computing. You've probably seen some of the recent contracts and some of the things like Google pulling out of their defense contracting. You get Microsoft Azure you hear a lot about Amazon web services. So cloud computing is a big thing right now and how the government is going to move forward in the future.

                     Now, off to the right, we have some it says Potential Partnership mechanisms and it basically just includes a variety of ways the government can work with companies. And they're covering everything here from Baas Silver Program STI, which I've talked pretty extensively about these on some of my other podcasts, OTAs, etc., that we had one podcast just on OTA. So if you want more information on any of those, I would just scroll through our podcast or go to the website, Dodcontract.com, I got some videos up there as well that walk through a lot of this. Now there's a place here for you to submit your solutions. I'm clicking on that really quickly, but basically it's going to take you to a page where you fill in some easy information, what is your name, etc. and then it's going to take you through a quad chart template that you would have to put together some other templates and solutions submissions form, but it walks you through the process. So pretty relatively easy if you want to knock out something and send a submission in here just so you can have someone take a look at and say, hey, we think this fits, or maybe it doesn't, they'll give you a good idea. Just scrolling through the website here, it goes through what does multi domain mean? It kind of goes through their domains, land, AIRC, space, cyber, because we certainly were trying to connect information in all of those areas. And it walks through in a little bit more detail different capabilities they're looking for. But again, there are a lot of programs like this and I'm not speaking to JADC2, but I mean that aren't something that you necessarily see on Sam.gov, but you may go to once you have a target agency that you're trying to sell to, I would start investigating some of the different organizations within that agency.

                      We get the Department of Defense right, which also has all the services underneath it. But if you're targeting Army, Army Futures Command is just one piece of the army, right? So here's one thing that you can look at but Army Corps of Engineers may be a better fit for what your company provides. You can go check out their websites, small business sites and find different events or potentially opportunities for you to make submissions through like this. They are great ways to get in front of the right people on the other side. I always follow up and ask for a meeting after I make a submission. So that's just a little piece of advice from me to you and hopefully you found this informative. I'm going to start bringing more of these to you through the podcast. So obviously these are going to be more time sensitive, I guess you could say, because this is going to be due on December 31, 2021. But I'm sure there will be future submission windows that open as well. If you're listening to this, after that, always you could reach out to me how it can apply to your company.

                     [09:46] Richard C. Howard: Hope you enjoy the episode. Please subscribe to the podcast and even review it's. Very much appreciated. If you're interested in selling products and services to the Department of Defense, I have something for you that you're not going to find anywhere else in the world. The team and I created a program that takes everything you need to win defense contracts and put it into one place. Up until now, only large defense companies and a small amount of people in the know have had access to how products and services are really sold to the Department of Defense. I've taken all of that information and put it in a step-by-step training module that shows you how to consistently sell to the US. Military. If you join our membership, not only do you get the model, but you get weekly sessions with former DOD acquisitions officers for training guidance to answer your questions and a community of like minded business owners that want to partner on different opportunities to bid for subcontracting and teaming, or just to discuss general strategy on how to sell to the DOD. You have access to every course I've created, every coaching session I've ever recorded and every interview with an acquisition professional that I've ever conducted. And we cover topics that range from defense sales planning and competitor analysis to SBIR and STTR foreign military sales. The list goes on. Go to Dodcontract.com if you are interested and I would love to see you in the membership.

If you enjoyed this episode, you can also check out Why Work with Small Business Office and how it can help you in submitting government sales proposals.