Air Force’s Digital Directorate Awards Kinetica a Contract with $100M Ceiling to Provide a Streaming Data Warehouse to Fuse and Enrich Sensor Data in Real Time
Kinetica, the streaming data warehouse that combines historical and streaming data analysis with powerful location intelligence and AI, announced a five-year contract with the Air Force to deliver a streaming data warehouse for the NORAD and USNORTHCOM Pathfinder program that will tie independent systems together across air, land, sea, space, and cyber domains, creating a fused operational picture. This contract transitions and expands on capabilities demonstrated during a one-year prototyping effort with NORAD and USNORTHCOM and DIU, the Department of Defense organization that exclusively works with commercial companies to solve national security challenges.
The Kinetica Streaming Data Warehouse ingests, analyzes, and visualizes massive data sets
with trillions of rows in order to model possible outcomes and assess risk. By broadening and
deepening data analysis capabilities, The Kinetica Streaming Data Warehouse enhances
situational awareness–key to anticipating an adversary.
“One leap forward to improve all domain awareness, information dominance and decision
superiority, in coordination with the Defense Innovation Unit, is the NORAD and U.S.
NORTHCOM Pathfinder program. We are nine months into the development of a Homeland
Defense data ecosystem prototype. This effort is a technology leap forward for Homeland
Defense command and control systems,” said General Glen VanHerck, Commander, North
American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command
(USNORTHCOM) during a recent presentation to The Institute for Defense and Government
Advancement Hypersonic Weapons Summit.
By filtering and fusing multi-domain sensor feeds, The Kinetica Streaming Data Warehouse can
quickly ingest and correlate airborne objects across sensors, building feature-rich entities. This
will allow military operators to deepen their data analysis capabilities and increase their
situational awareness across North America by combining functions currently performed by
multiple isolated systems into a cloud platform producing real-time intelligence for leadership to
act on.
The Kinetica Streaming Data Warehouse can process data at massive scale, powered by
NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs and Intel CPUs, taking on previously impossible challenges. Data
streams into The Kinetica Streaming Data Warehouse from a variety of sources, including
everything from legacy databases to sensors, which are analyzed in real time.
“Information dominance contributes to our national security and we’re proud to partner with
Kinetica to help get warfighters better access to this information,” said Brian Gunderson, a Booz
Allen Hamilton Vice President and leader in the firm’s defense business. “The volume of
intelligence data requires innovative approaches like the application of AI, to unearth valuable
insights potentially buried in the data.”
What makes this solution different from previous command-and-control systems is that it is
predicated on distributed computing using massive parallelization from thousands of processing
cores. The Kinetica Streaming Data Warehouse is deployed on AWS GovCloud. As an open
platform, teams of data scientists can bring their machine learning models into Kinetica for entity
classification and anomaly detection. Further differentiating itself from legacy platforms,
Kinetica’s open platform is accessible to government and third-party users building analytical
tools and end-user applications, speeding innovation as well as collaboration.
“Most technologies today are not equipped to handle the volume of data along with the highspeed velocity flowing in from non-stop data feeds,” said Amit Vij, President and Co-Founder, Kinetica. “Usually the velocity of data breaks the latest technologies of today, and this presents a serious challenge to many organizations that require real-time actionable intelligence from multiple domains. We are excited about this partnership with NORAD/USNORTHCOM and Digital Directorate because Kinetica is purpose-built to ingest, analyze, and visualize real-time intelligence from multiple, high-velocity streaming data feeds, providing a complete operational picture on which we can act.”
To learn more about Kinetica and Kinetica’s public sector work, visit kinetica.com/solutions/public-sector/.