Future Operating Concept Creating Opportunities for Tech Companies

By Stephanie Meloni, Senior Analyst

The Air Force is starting to shift IT priorities toward space, cyberspace, and C2ISR, which speaks to the service’s overall plan for future operations. The Air Force will want to achieve dominance across all domains in order to enable air superiority. This will be one of many topics covered during my one-hour Webinar on Air Force IT Sales Opportunities: Where to Aim High in FY17 on May 12.

The Air Force Future Operating Concept will depend on operating in a multi-domain environment. This means the Air Force wants to synchronize information coming from air, ground, intelligence, and especially cyberspace in order to get the full picture of what is happening across the warfighting domain.

This is going to create opportunities across all technology categories–everything from networking and infrastructure management, to command and control applications integration, to data collection and analysis. Air Force will be relying on industry’s help to break down information stovepipes and securely share information between domains.

On the cybersecurity side, the Air Force has dedicated more resources and funds toward increasing protections for weapons systems and associated equipment and sensors. As the Air Force works to integrate cyber operations into air, space, and intelligence operations, it’ll balance out its cyber profile by extending cyber protections beyond just networks into base installations and their weapons systems. The service will look for solutions around systems engineering, threat and vulnerability analysis, and compliance testing.

The other main priority the Air Force needs the most help with is systems automation and standardization of platforms. Keeping systems simple for users will help them direct more personnel off simple IT tasks and on to more mission critical functions. The Air Force will be looking for solutions for applications integration, middleware, and BPM to increase automation.

To learn more about COTS sales opportunities within the Air Force, including key organizations, decisions makers, and IT programs that include cybersecurity, infrastructure management, data analytics and management, and applications integration technologies, please register for the upcoming webinar Air Force IT Sales Opportunities: Where to Aim High in FY17 on May 12 at 11am.