Department of Defense

DDF/Alliance

Octo - Department of Defense Logo

The Problem:

The U.S. Military developed the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) Integration Backbone (DIB) to make intelligence products visible, accessible, understandable, trusted, and interoperable between the seven DCGS programs operated by the United State Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, NGA, SOF, and the Intelligence Community. Since each service has its own intelligence collection capabilities and Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination (PED) capabilities, a system was needed for secure content discovery and retrieval both within and between programs. Thousands of processing nodes are required to support operations from the tactical edge to the national enterprise. Furthermore, coalition partners including the Five Eyes community, NATO, and various Bilateral and Multilateral sharing agreements drive a need for an ITAR free, cost-effective means for intelligence sharing.

The Solution:

Recognizing this need, Octo developed the Alliance, a common data layer that abstracts services and business logic from the underlying data structures to enable rapid integration of new data sources. Alliance is built to adapt any enterprise and has become the engine of intelligence discovery and retrieval in systems around the world. The system provides a powerful query interface to allow users to construct precise queries, define the criteria of the information desired, and quickly retrieve the information from across the enterprise and beyond. Alliance was developed as open source software and fully supports open standards from industry and government, including OpenSearch, OGC CSW, and NATO STANAG 4559 for Libraries, 4609 for video, and 4607 for GMTI.

Key Takeaways
  • Open source technologies provide tremendous capability and work well even in the complex and highly secure intelligence domain
  • Open architecture provides flexibility needed to support diverse requirements in multiple organizations
  • Standards-based interoperability promotes and ensures international collaboration and partnerships

The Benefits

Alliance made discoverable intelligence information from thousands of systems and has been deployed on several U.S. intelligence programs and those of our international partners around the globe. By using open source technology, the system can be deployed at scale and an entire ecosystem of capabilities can be quickly developed and shared between enterprises.