AUSA Day Three: We “Get It,” It Seems

16 March 2017
AUSA Booth

Well, we wrapped the show. It was a terrific time and we celebrated at dinner with our extended team here in our Huntsville home town, sharing what we learned and getting the valuable insights we gained directly out to our colleagues.

Among the things we learned is that there is great enthusiasm for our new product ventures. This is obviously gratifying because we, like all companies that supply to the military, must take risks in developing new products.

There’s an important choice to be made, for example. Do we utilize the latest in-feed technologies and reap the performance benefits while accepting that these must be made rugged and reliable—or go with tried and true, missing out on the performance and SWaP-C improvements possible by innovating?

Constant innovation

We’ve chosen to take the former route because we believe that constant innovation and the acceptance of risk is what our customers require of us. More than that, their customer, the warfighter, demands the best equipment possible. Our customers tell us that adversaries are smart, they are capable and they are determined, but none of the folks we talked with this week think they are any match for what our Army, through our strong industrial base, can bring to the fight. 

When Army leadership hears that we are speeding development and deployment times with our mission ready systems, and that we’re building COTS, fully managed, secure network hardware and future-proof modular embedded computing hardware, they tell us that we “get it”; they tell us we’re listening, and we have their backs as they defend ours. There’s no better news than that for us.

Our dinner together was great fun, and we shared a few high fives. To be sure, we are all glad the show is over—but we also realize that now we must get back to the real work of applying what we have learned, following up on the actions we took and making sure we stay true to the promises we made.

Larry Schaffer

Larry Schaffer has been with us in a business development role since 2001, and works to create and maintain long-term, strategic relationships with key companies engaged in embedded computing for ground systems applications with a strong emphasis on image processing and distribution. He was born in Pennsylvania and educated as an Electrical Engineer in New Jersey and California (where he now lives). Just don’t ask him to tell you about being a war baby…