On May 17th, 2022 Sigma Defense announced the acquisition of SUB-U Systems bringing together one organization with a 16-year history of providing hardware integration and tactical communications for C5ISR, SATCOM and JADC2 and another company that specializes in designing and building custom IP networking solutions for the tactical edge.  We sat down with Matt Jones, CEO of Sigma Defense and Keir Tomasso, CEO of SUB-U Systems (now EVP of SUB-U Operations for the combined company) to learn what this means for their customers.

 

What are unique attributes about SUB-U and your solutions that have made you successful?

Keir Tomasso (KT):  SUB-U designs and builds custom IP networking appliances from the ground up, specializing in Software Definable Networking – Appliances™ that support hosting one or more Virtualized Networking Functions (VNFs) and virtualized application servers. The use of VNFs is becoming increasingly commonplace in the commercial IP networking, Software Defined Networking (SDN), and Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) user space. As the DOD and Federal government. evolves their tactical networks to leverage these technologies, SUB-U’s appliances are at the forefront of bringing these commercial IP networking technologies to the “tactical edge” of networking community. Customers who “lean in” on next generation technologies rely on SUB-U to produce the hardware solutions for them.

 

How does Sub-U align to Sigma Defense’s vision and strategy?

Matt Jones (MJ): Our vision at Sigma Defense is autonomously connecting people, systems and data from space to operator.  We have a distinguished history of enabling communications at the edge with the Stingray Tactical Relay System and our growth strategy is to provide far greater capabilities through software enabled communications.  The acquisition of SOLUTE was the first step, and now with the acquisition of SUB-U Systems, we have a far more robust portfolio of networking hardware that will allow is to provide enhanced capabilities in a much smaller form factor.  Our goal is to provide our customers with a competitive advantage in a multi-domain operating environment for decision dominance and the addition of SUB-U Systems allows us to accelerate that vision and provide our customers with the capabilities they need much faster than we could have before.

 

How will the combined company deliver a better solution and experience to your DoD customers?

 KT:  Whereas Sigma previously relied on third part hardware vendor’s appliances for use in their product offerings the acquisition of SUB-U will allow Sigma to produce smaller, more rugged, more capable solutions for customers by being able to design and produce products and solutions that meet the customers exact requirements versus integration of Commercial Off-the-Shelf & Government off-the-Shelf (COTS/GOTS) appliances to try and meet customer requirements.

MJ: Keir and his team at Sub U Systems have developed a powerful tactical networking hardware platform that aligns to our customer demands of faster, smaller and more powerful technology in a rugged form factor.  This is a game changer for Sigma Defense as will be able to bring new applications to market like analytics at the edge, AI/ML and enhanced C2 networked communications to deliver better outcomes.  The bottom line is that we will be better equipped to provide greater capabilities in an even smaller footprint than we do today.

 

What can the market expect to see in the next 6, 12 and 24 for months from the combined companies of Sigma Defense, Sub U and SOLUTE?

MJ: We will move quickly to deliver on our vision of providing greater capabilities to our customers leveraging SUB-U hardware and SOLUTE software engineering.  Our focus is on large systems modernization and we now have the resources to deliver on this vision, end-to-end.  SUB-U will enable us to not only deliver higher performance hardware but to provide custom hardware solutions tailored to specific use-cases for a broad range of applications in the DoD, IC and commercial markets.  By combining SUB-U’s solution set and product capabilities with Sigma Defense’s operating model, process maturity and management experience, the combined company will be better positioned to deliver long-term customer value, expand market share and grow revenue.

KT:  The acquisition by Sigma will provide us with additional technical, operations and manufacturing resources, allowing SUB-U to scale up our ability to support large program of record customer opportunities. Additionally, the breadth and depth of SUB-Us products will allow Sigma to present more solution based offerings that span both software and hardware, which will allow Sigma to pursue and win many more programs that have a hardware element to them.