Royal Netherlands Army Awards Intelliden a Multi-Million Euro Contract To Support Elite Command and Control Communications Infrastructure, Supporting the Network Centric Warfare Concept

(PRWEB) May 29, 2004

Intelliden Intelligent Networking Platform Supporting Sophisticated IP

Networks as Part of The TITAAN Advanced Military Project

Intelliden Corporation, the intelligent networking company, today announced that the Royal Netherlands Army (RNLA) has awarded it an in excess of a one million dollar contract to provide the foundation for its elite TITAAN project, carried out in the Command Control Support Centre (C2SC), supporting the Network Centric Warfare concept. The contract follows months of extensive field trials and stringent military testing of Intelliden’s products.

The recent military conflicts have ushered in a new defense era for NATO countries, placing greater emphasis on the requirement of co-ordination and co-operation between nations and the interoperability of their different command and control systems. Modern war today, as well as modern peace making and peace keeping, require rapid deployment of army theatres and above all, maximum flexibility. Each country within the NATO military alliance is responsible for contributing a different expertise and set of resources to the alliance.

The result of the RNLA’s development is the Theatre Independent Army and Airforce Network (TITAAN) project, which is based on using highly secure, sophisticated IP networks as an active part of military strategy. The C2SC TITAAN development team was looking for a vendor (with the prospective of a strategic partnership) with advanced technology to amplify the characteristics of IP networks beyond today’s capabilities.

After performing initial trials using some of the finest engineers and IT experts on the RNLA research development team, the MATLOGCO selected the Intelliden R-Series™ to be the core of strategic networking—security, agility, reliability and control — that is one of the vital aspects to today’s military units.

“We conducted some fairly in-depth field testing in simulated environments and Intelliden was the only company capable of providing us with fully policy based network enforcement using a modelled based approach. This means we can make immediate policy-based decisions to control all of the numerous and disparate aspects of the network, such as satellites, switches, routers, in a unified controlled network architecture,” said Ed van Beek, Lead Architect, Integrated Management and Control for the RNLA.

The Intelliden R-Series™ solutions enable networks to operate more intelligently by dynamically responding to strategic goals—be they business or military—and by automating network change management, optimizing network resources, streamlining processes and enforcing policy in network operations. Instead of having to make manual network changes—and risk making errors that could block critical communications—IT personnel can focus on more important network issues and operational efficiency is increased.

The TITAAN project has not only been successful internally, but has also won international acclaim from the prestigious Network Centric Warfare (NCW) Awards, winning the 2004 Best NCW Program / Initiative from a Coalition Partner. The NCW Awards were established to honour, recognise and promote initiatives in the US Department of Defence, Coalition Governments, and Defence Industry that exemplify the principles of network-centric warfare and support information age transformation.

Currently, IT specialists have to log into the network, on a vendor by vendor - device by device basis, to make manual changes, prioritising which phones—identified by their IP addresses—have priority in a restricted bandwidth situations. This manual process can be time-consuming, and human configuration errors are always a possibility. In a normal network environment, configuration errors can cause inconvenience. On the battlefield, errors can have disastrous consequences.

Using a single, Web-based interface, network administrators are able to manage simultaneous changes to a variety of network routers, switches, firewalls and other devices. Because the Intelliden solution uses business and network policies to control the automation of device changes, military IT specialists in the field won’t have to spend time configuring individual devices as conditions change. Instead, network events will trigger automatic changes in network devices, which in turn will support new network services.

“The other aspect of Intelliden is speed of deployment,” said Ed van Beek. “It might sound a bit melodramatic, but using Intelliden at the heart of the TITAAN system can make the difference between correct on time decision support and support after the fact (which in military operations can have disastrous consequences) because we don’t need to send soldiers out in the field to reconfigure devices.

The automation of Intelliden means we are not dependent on heavily trained engineers on a unit – per – unit basis in a deployment. Warfare and even peace making can involve very extreme conditions which require a non-static network. We need to jump on the back of a jeep change locations yet still maintain maximum robustness and scalability”. Unlike war in the twentieth century, which could take ten or twelve weeks to plan and implement, conditions in the twenty first century could change from peace to war overnight, and our ability to respond quickly and effectively is absolutely fundamental to our success.

Ravi Pather, Vice President EMEA Operations for Intelliden, added, “Intelliden eliminates the need for manual network changes. It abstracts all of the physical, logical and configuration characteristics of the hardware and software of every single device in the network, enabling RNLA to have complete visibility and dynamic control via a software application layer.” “The military sector is just one of several exciting new markets for Intelliden where we are seeing increasing demand for the rapid deployment of network services for both military and commercial sectors.”

TITAAN is already generating significant interest and requests from numerous other areas of the military. The system will be deployed throughout former Yugoslavia in live military operations.

About Intelliden Corporation

With the Intelliden R-Series™ software suite, networks become more intelligent and efficient by dynamically responding to business priorities, which allows businesses and organizations to reduce costs, optimize network resources, increase network security and accelerate service activation. The Intelliden R-Series solution consists of four intelligent networking product pillars: Auditing and Reporting, Configuration and Control, Provisioning and Activation, and Security Management. Headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colo., Intelliden has offices in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and London. For more information, visit http://www.intelliden.com.