Displaying items by tag: usaf

AN AIR FORCE FOCUS ON AUTOMATION

Face to Face with Our Air Force Counterparts

This year’s AFCEA MITS conference in Montgomery, Alabama, was a fantastic experience. The TSRI team was delighted to spend quality time with this community of long-time partners, the U.S. Air Force, and other military leaders. It gave us an in-person opportunity to deepen established relationships and help strengthen our understanding of the Air Force’s critical goals and initiatives. The panel sessions and discussions reflected the impressive intelligence, passion, and dedication of the Air Force and our industry colleagues.

This year we were proud to sponsor the conference to help advance the military’s mission and the education of the future technology workforce through AFCEA’s yearly charity golf tournament and President’s Breakfast.

Conversations on the Green

The golf tournament and breakfast held the day before the conference offered an excellent opportunity to build new relationships and strengthen existing ones in a fun setting. René Wagner, our Director of Business Development, says, “It was very exciting to talk with our partners about how they're feeling about the industry and about our common goal of helping the Air Force.”

Our sponsorship helped AFCEA raise over $127,000 for schools and universities through the Montgomery AFCEA Chapter Education Foundation. The money will go to promote IT integration in classrooms across Alabama’s River Region by providing students and teachers with scholarships, grants, equipment, and awards to support technical workforce development.

Insights from the Main Event

With around 700 attendees, the 2023 MITS conference provided a focused forum for in-depth discussions with the Air Force about their critical IT goals. This year’s conference theme was the “Unwavering Drive for Automation,” a natural fit for TSRI’s automated architecture-driven software application modernization and refactoring solution. Our approach consistently achieves over 99.9% automation, meeting and exceeding Air Force typical expectations of 60% or 70% automation, at minimum. In addition to the time and money TSRI’s high automation solution can save organizations, our iterative refactoring process improves code quality and increases applications' speed, security, readability, and scalability.

Throughout the conference, we heard new ideas for business, mission, and IT automation, and we shared how, at TSRI, we leverage automation at every step of the software modernization journey. In conversations with our partners and USAF customers about the continued success of TSRI’s application modernization solution and process, we gained valuable insight into what sets our approach apart. Beyond our technical solution, these conversations highlighted the importance of our comprehensive planning, diligent expectation setting, and expertise in post-modernization operational change management.

“I’ve been living and breathing the Air Force logistics modernization strategy and struggle for over a decade.” Says Greg Tadlock, TSRI’s Vice President of Sales, “At MITS, what I learned was continued reinforcement that we're on the right track. That what we're offering customers is the right solution.“

Taking Center Stage

“The single greatest moment at the event, for me,” says Greg, “was the full auditorium as René introduced TSRI at the beginning of the automation panel. You can only imagine…for a small company like TSRI, it felt like a big moment.” The panel discussion addressed some of the central questions of automation, such as which business and technical processes make sense to automate and what level of automation is feasible to run critical operations more efficiently for the Air Force and other military organizations. The panel discussed familiar and innovative automation tools and methodologies, including new AI technologies.

Hot Topics: Platform Selection and Cyber-Resilience

In addition to automation and AI, another major topic of conversation was cloud infrastructure and platform migration for military systems. To achieve the high levels of security, performance, and maintainability required of military IT solutions, our Air Force customers need to identify and configure the optimal environments for their systems. Paul Saladna, an Enterprise Architect at NTT Data, responsible for the Air Force’s large and very successful SBSS ILS-S project, speaks to this question in our recent webinar. Do you go with a particular cloud platform based on your systems language or database type? Or do you choose by the server or operating system? In many cases, it’s not a simple, formulaic decision.

As more Air Force and other military systems are migrated to the cloud, several considerations exist in the choice and configuration of their target environments. Cyber-resilience is near the top of the list, as is scalability and the ease of system maintenance. There’s not one “if-System-A-then-Target-B” answer, which made our conversations at MITS all the more interesting and informative. With the Air Force tackling several new initiatives, now is the perfect time to engage in these critical discussions. TSRI consults with our partners and customers to help select cloud environments and configure optimal architectures for each application.

START YOUR MODERNIZATION JOURNEY WITH A TSRI CONSULTATION.

Many thanks to the Air Force and AFCEA for another great MITS!

Greg summed up our feelings about the MITS event: "It was an honor to participate with such an influential group of folks at the Air Force. It was great to get a chance to understand their needs and truly introduce TSRI’s full capabilities.” We look forward to next year and the rewarding initiatives and breakthroughs we’ll tackle with our partners and military colleagues until then!

---

Proven by decades of results. Prove it for yourself. 
For decades, TSRI clients have been discovering a dramatically faster, more accurate, and less expensive automated modernization process. We’ve earned a place as the go-to resource for enterprise corporations, government, military, healthcare, and more. Now prove it for yourself. Find out how the proprietary TSRI modernization process delivers future-ready, cloud-based code in any modern language in a fraction of the time. 

See Case Studies 
Learn About Our Technology 
Get Started on Your Modernization Journey Today!

MILSTAR (Military Strategic & Tactical Relay) is the tactical and strategic multiservice satellite system designed to provide survivable communications for U.S. forces worldwide. The system needed to achieve higher data-rate modes than the low and medium-data-rate modes of the older generation MILSTAR satellites which were written in J3 JOVIAL software technology. This required the JOVIAL code to be modernized, which enabled the system's operation on newer hardware with simplified maintenance.

Customer: US Air Force & Northrop Grumman (Formerly TRW) Source & Target Language: Jovial to C++ Lines of Code: 143,000 Duration:  1 Month Services: Code Assessment, Automated Code Transformation,  Automated "As-Is” Documentation, Use of JANUS Studio® Toolset, Transformation Blueprint®

ITT Corporation awarded a sole-source contract to TSRI for modernization of the COBRA DANE Radar Calibration System (SCRS) of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) under the Air Force’s System Engineering & Sustainment Integrator (SENSOR) program.

United States Air Force SBSS ILS-S COBOL to Java on AWS Modernization

A major component of the system is 54 years old, written in COBOL, and provides retail-level business logic. The component runs on mainframes that have proven to be extremely difficult to change and manage, and the DoD needed to modernize the component to drive down operating costs and move to an open platform, while retaining all functionality....

The U.S. Air Force's Weapons System Cost Retrieval System (WSCRS), designation H036C, was written in COBOL running on an Amdahl-5890 platform and using a flat file data base. The system required modernization by the Wright-Patterson Mission System Group (MSG) to improve base support for the Air Force weapon financial systems. TSRI transformed 100% of the WSCRS COBOL code into C++ and facilitated an error-free delivery to the customer several weeks ahead of schedule.

Customer: US Air Force Source & Target Language: Cobol to C++ Lines of Code: 627,500 Duration:  5 months Services: Code Transformation, Automated Refactoring, Installation and Testing Support, Remote Support for Customer Acceptance, Transformation Blueprint®

The System Engineering and Sustainment Integrator System includes ground-based radars, space surveillance sensors, ground-based missile warning, and optical systems operated by United States Strategic Command and Air Force Space Command. Command and control for these radar systems were written in multiple legacy languages, and needed transformation to modernized and refactored C++.

Customer & Integrator: Litton & US Air Force Source & Target Language: Assembler to C++ Lines of Code: 5,000 Duration:  4 months Services: Code Transformation from Multiple Legacy Languages, Automated Refactoring, Installation and Testing Support, Transformation Blueprint®​