In this podcast, experts discuss how to build durable, future-ready architectures through Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA) and modular open architecture, a "disconnected-first" approach and adaptable platforms such as Spectro Cloud Palette. Learn why effective tactical edge and edge computing security must be rooted in architectural decisions, rather than added as features after deployment.
Securing the Tactical Edge: Modular Open Systems Architecture
[Anthony Jimenez]
Welcome back to CarahCast, the podcast from Carahsoft, the trusted government IT solutions provider. Subscribe to get the latest technology updates in the public sector. I'm Anthony Jimenez, your host from the Carahsoft production team.
On behalf of SpectroCloud and Tsecond, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around exploring how SpectroCloud secures tactical edge operations with modular open systems architectures. Build resilient software for environments at the edge. Mark Perry, director of public sector growth, and Dr. Raj Iyer, president, will discuss securing the tactical edge.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
So all right, everybody, thanks for joining us. I'm Raj Iyer, president of Tsecond, Bay Area-based startup company. We're a deep tech defense company focused on bringing edge AI infrastructure solutions to the tactical edge.
I've had the pleasure of being in the company for well over a year now, but also had the distinct pleasure of being the Army's first CIO at the Pentagon for three years, that the Army's digital transformation strategy. And so much of what we're going to talk about today is what's changed in the last five years since the Army's digital transformation strategy, how has industry moved, how has technology moved, and how is industry reacting to what we're seeing in terms of the new geopolitical situation and threat environments. Mark?
[Mark Perry]
Yeah, appreciate that, Dr. Iyer. And I don't know, I'm kind of fanning out over here. I'm really excited about this discussion today.
So Mark Perry, I'm with SpectroCloud. I lead our growth for the public sector and been dealing with tactical edge for quite a while. And it's been a kind of a hot topic.
And I think now, you know, somebody, a modern day Marine said the other day, I've heard the word hands and modern warfighter a lot is, and he's right, right? How are we getting things into the hands of our warfighters now? How are we making sure that it's available?
How do we make sure it's open? How can we make sure it can be done in all of these regions that you said, and then geopolitically to, hey, this could be the next, you know, I guess you could say hot button, right? So how do we build all that out?
So thanks again for joining.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
Thank you, Mark. Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here.
[Mark Perry]
Really looking forward to it. So I mean, I think we kind of already did get into it. But I will say that, again, fanning out here, what you've kind of built at Tsecond and kind of where, in my mind, the tactical edge is going.
And I think we used to refer to it. I talk about all the time is like that hub and spoke, that old hub and spoke. I call them like micro clouds now that are going to have to be out there in these, you know, austere environments that, hey, they might have to take on a big workload to be able to ingest stuff and do it real time.
I mean, we used to talk about it all the time. I was an infantry guy, so I was never cyber or anything like that. But speed to us was essential.
Yeah. And I think it's even more, you know, prevalent now, I guess you could say.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
Yeah, Mark, that's a great point. And, you know, I think the definition of the edge and the complexity of the edge is rapidly changing and evolving. And that's because of the evolving threats that we see on the battlefield.
And so it used to be that, you know, again, when you look at the GWAT era, the last 20 years of what we've been doing, it was really about, OK, if we had a really great command post that was survivable and you could, you know, essentially centralize your command and control, you know, to that AOR and you had the resiliency when it came to communication. And then you were, you know, you had the logistics to go with it. You had, you know, your fires to go with it.
You know, you did a pretty good job. Right. And these were the days when the Army was fighting at the brigade combat team level.
Right. That was a unit of action. And and it was, you know, we had a force that was lethal and we saw the results.
We saw how well the DOD did in, you know, in the Middle East. And and then when we, you know, as we moved into the era of the invasion of Ukraine and we saw how the contested environment was really, you know, putting pressure on at the edge. So much of that architecture, that edge architecture for how not only how we fought, but the infrastructure and the IT and the support that's needed to actually survive in that new world completely changed.
And and I think was, you know, it was it was a great awakening moment for the Department of Defense and our Department of War. But I was fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time when we saw the threat environment change and we were building out the Army's first ever digital transformation strategy at that point. And and we knew that what we had to build was for the future where, you know, and even then when we were looking at, you know, pure competitors like China, we knew that, you know, we were always going to be contested in the spectrum.
We knew we're always going to have to plan for resiliency at every level of the of the operational fight. And to do that, you know, having centralized command posts was no longer something that was viable. It had to move to, you know, an architecture and a war fighting doctrine where command and control was, you know, distributed, where every unit at every echelon had to survive and be lethal, being completely disconnected.
Right. And and to achieve that architecture meant that you had to completely reimagine every aspect and every piece of, you know, how you were putting together, you know, your your support for a particular unit, you know, at every echelon. And then you add to the fact that the Army decided for all the right reasons that the unit of action now was at the division level meant that, you know, you no longer restricted to, you know, really what we call the tactical boundary.
It's now the integration between all the way from the edge to the enterprise and back. Right. So that seamless connection all the way from the tactical edge to the strategic meant that, you know, we had to completely rethink everything.
And we also had to rethink everything from the perspective of not just communications and networks, but in terms of data. Right. Which is what we're going to spend a lot of time talking about.
So for the last 20 years, I would say, you know, the Department of Defense has been laser focused on everything that's net centricity. You know, how do we protect networks? How do we get resilient networks to now the shift being how do we get to being data centric?
How do we make our decisions with data, with limited data, with unclean data and with large volumes of data at the edge? Then the network is no longer as assured when power is no longer assured. And so that is now the reality of the new tactical edge is you got to be on the move.
You got to make decisions on the move. You got to be, you know, resilient in terms of taking as much data as you need with you on the go and to be able to survive and be lethal in that environment. And so this is a foundational shift in terms of that threat environment.
And we see some tremendous work being done by all of the services in terms of, you know, adjusting and moving to this to this new to this new mode. And it's for us at Tsecond, it's been, you know, not that this was a coincidence, because when, you know, when the company was founded, it was all based on the fact that we're going to see over the next decade a move towards, you know, more decision making at the edge, right? The edge is no longer just a data collection, you know, platform.
The edge is now where decisions are made. And and so and that, by the way, and that's just not in the defense sector, right? That is we're seeing that happening in oil and gas and mining, you know, in telecom, you name it.
Every industry today is seeing more and more data being collected at the edge, where, in fact, Gartner has put out a study that said, you know, between now and I think 2029 or 2030, you know, 70 percent of the data that's generated is going to be at the edge.
[Mark Perry]
Right.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
So which meant that everything that we've built in the past in terms of software as a service systems, you know, data platforms and everything that was all, you know, supporting that enterprise corporate level headquarters decision making, all that now has to translate into a capability that, you know, is decentralized at the edge. And it's truly an exciting time. And it's really exciting for us to be at the second with the right products at the right time.
[Mark Perry]
Yeah. I mean, there I could literally turn this. I don't think we talked about this before.
I could turn this into an easy five hour conversation because and again, that's why I love speaking with you. You nail on so many aspects that are talked about and not talked about on a daily basis. Right.
And one of the things listening to you speak through it and the things you've had to transform over the last five years. Where it comes into play is complexity. Right.
And I think what a lot of people lose or maybe they might not understand is even from regulated industries and the way that they work today compared to 10 years ago is a lot different. And that regulated piece of it is more important than ever. So this is leading to kind of that question.
And when we talk about it, there's a lot of underlying things that have to happen. Like for us, it's SpectraPub, right? Everybody's like, you know, I speak to it as a unified platform because that's really what it is.
But underlying, we're talking about, you know, Kubernetes and containers and, you know, the difficulty of standing up environments like that, it's hard. We make it easy. Right.
So I'm being very profound when I say that. I think that's our actionable as civilians and as proponents of, you know, the branches and regulated industries, making it as easy as possible to take these environments that are normally, like you said, in large data centers, large, huge data sets are supporting it. I remember working health care, you know, 10, 11 years ago, and there was a company that had three petabytes of data even back then.
And I couldn't fathom that at the time. And I'm like, now trying to take stuff to the edge and going, OK, I want to do this surveillance or command and control or all this kind of stuff. And I need to process it now.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
Yeah.
[Mark Perry]
Because that's where we're at. And the reality is we can. But here we go.
Now, for us on the software side, we're like, OK, we need to be able to support that and make it as easy as possible. That's right.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
So so there's two two points I want to hit hit across. Right. One is obviously the the data density challenge.
So depending upon, you know, whether, you know, you're depending on what level of echelon you're in, you know, let's say you're not a battalion level or below with the amount of sensors on the battlefield today. Right. Literally, I think in a week, in a couple of weeks, you could be up to about 200 terabytes of storage that's needed.
Now, what's happened is and this is between all the way from, you know, EW sensors, cyber sensors, SIGINT, ELINT, OSINT, GEOINT, all the multi sensors. And by the way, not just our own sensors, but, you know, sensors coming from our allies and partners. Right.
Because, you know, those are out there, too, in the in the joint battlefield. And so so all of that is leading to tremendous amount of data. And it was surprising, you know, when we looked at it, you know, first, of course, you know, the Department of Defense, then we we complained about not having enough data.
Right. This was just over five years ago, wasn't enough data, couldn't access it, you know, and wasn't enough for decision making. And in five years, we'll come to a point where everybody's screaming, we got too much data.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
Right.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
Which means that this is now putting a humongous burden, you know, in terms of, you know, cognitive overload on on the warfighter. Right. So it's very clear that if if we don't bring AI into this, if we don't bring processing to the edge, right, much of this data is just going to be unused.
And we're seeing that already so much, you know, so for us at Tsecond, we participate in a lot of joint experimentation efforts, you know, in the Department of War and the Army and other places. And one of the first things we do is we go through and we try to understand data flows. And how is what is your data architecture looking like today?
Obviously, you're experimenting with a lot of new sensors, lots of new technologies, you know, UAS, counter UAS, all that great stuff. But then, you know, when we look at the data architecture, it invariably goes back to something that was pre, you know, all of these new technologies. Right.
Which meant that they assumed that there was never going to be enough storage available to, you know, to work with all this data. And so a lot of the preprocessing happened on sensors. A lot of things happened where, you know, what you were only looking at was the final product and you were not ever getting the raw data.
And that's because there was always this challenge with not having enough storage at the edge. But and that works OK to some extent. Right.
The problem is two things. One is, in order to establish a real common operating picture at the edge, you're going to need, you know, multi-instance of fusion. Right.
And integration, which means, you know, it's great that you're getting one, you know, one operational picture coming in from your EW sensors, another one from your radars and another one from, you know, all these other sources. But what our commander is asking for is that complete true operational picture. Right.
What does that look like when you bring all these things together? That becomes a challenge when you're just looking at finished products. Right.
When it comes to intelligence. So that's one challenge. The second challenge is when it comes to running AI models at the edge, oftentimes these have been trained, obviously, with a set of data, you know, back in a data center or a cloud, which is great.
And now you are running these models at the edge. But with AI, with these models, we know, you know, if you heard about, if you heard the word, you know, what happens with models is that, you know, they drift. Right.
So you're trained in a set of data, but your data can change over a period of time and your models will have to keep, will have to be updated over a period of time as well. So what happens is if you, you know, if you, if you train your models with a bunch of data and you throw the data away, okay, your model is as good as the data was trained on. What you need in order to avoid drift is you want to be able to continuously train those models with new data as they're coming in, which means that you now have, you now have a need to not just keep the historical data, but also to bring in new data as they're getting generated every single day and to constantly, you know, readjust your models.
Right. So it's not something where you train something, you throw the data away. You've now come to a point where we realize you can't throw the data away.
It doesn't make any sense to throw the data away. So these are all big cultural shifts, foundational shifts in terms of the data architecture that we're seeing a lot of people just starting to, you know, scratch their heads and go, oh, I never thought about that. Right.
And the reason why they haven't thought about it is because they always assume I'm never going to have enough storage at the edge to keep as much data there. I'm never going to have compute power at the edge to process it. So I'm going to have to move it to the cloud.
If I'm going to have to move it to the cloud, I can't take all my data to the cloud. I'm only going to have to take some subset of the data, you know, back to the cloud because I've never had the bandwidth needed. So these were all workarounds that have now just become, you know, just a way of doing things today.
And, you know, really what it now is the time to challenge that. Right. Challenge those assumptions is that, OK, yeah, that's how you did it.
But those were under some constraints and, you know, limb fact that we thought, you know, you couldn't overcome. But that's not the case anymore. And I think that's a great opportunity today.
[Mark Perry]
Yeah, man. You said so many things, again, that there's so many tidbits I could take from everything you say. And again, you know, being in the industry for a long time is supporting everybody.
Everything you're saying is like spot on. That's probably why you were the first CIO of the Armory. But when I think about it in the conversations and how they shifted from everything you mentioned earlier, like commercial off the shelf to, you know, now you have teams.
And I saw it with like even this hackathon this week, you have service members now embracing, you know, open source and, you know, cloud native type of applications. And you see more and more, you know, people within our industry creating solutions based on those. And it's almost like people are kind of coming together.
We're still our separate companies, but we're producing, you know, code and everything else to support a community of stuff. And I think that's very important when I think about it. And, you know, just kind of rounding just a little bit, what we've talked about so far is in my mindset when I do this, it's like the old days where we used to sell storage and we would sell storage or we would talk about it.
I would architect it and place, but I would always ask them a lot of times. I'm like, well, this is great that I'm, you know, architecting this for you. What's your security situation?
And, you know, with DevOps and DevSecOps became that shift left where we started bringing it up more. And it's so funny how time just kind of mimics itself. And I feel like we still have to always stay ahead.
And it's the same way now. It's like, hey, start talking about it now. Make it known.
And then us in the industry can start to make that easier for you to adopt. Yeah, 100%.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
And so while we just talked about, you know, the data challenge, the other piece that I think is working in parallel and you just referred to that is the modernization that's happening with software architectures, right? So the data architecture is one challenge, software architecture, the application architecture is the next one. And as I noted earlier, you know, with the shift to everything, you know, that's being software defined means that, you know, one, the software has got to be decoupled from the hardware, right?
And then you want that modularity, interoperability, and flexibility to actually run your application anywhere, all the way from the cloud to running it into one of, you know, one of our small, you know, brick devices, right? And containers is probably one of the best ways to do that, right? And so that is the, from an application perspective, I think that is a huge culture change, much needed has to happen.
Because this is now how you start to manage your distributed workloads. You're able to have flexibility in terms of, you know, running different pieces of the application on different platforms, and then bridging them and bringing them together. But again, you know, completely agnostic to the actual hardware itself, you know, the application, the same piece of code is going to have to run in a multi-cloud environment, just as well it runs, you know, on an edge node.
And I think that is another huge, tremendous opportunity for you guys in Spectral Cloud, you know, with what you're doing. And we see that transformation happening, you know, a number of programs, including Army's Next Generation Command and Control, you know, we're seeing that, you know, that is the future. That's how it's going to be.
And when you do that, now, you know, operating the software, maintaining the software, central, you know, centralized control, but then yet decentralized execution and processing is all possible in that new architecture.
[Mark Perry]
Yeah, and it's refreshing to hear that. And I know, and I think it goes back to what you said earlier, is changing that mindset. And we're so, there's a lot of people still stuck in like, this is how it's done.
Like, this is hard for me to grasp. And again, you know, you kind of nailed it. If we bring it down to that level, containers is that kind of thing, because when I think about it and what you're referring to, right, you know, in the enterprise civilian world, we think of multi-tenancy.
And a lot of people don't think about that when we talk about the FedSpace, but it is a huge multi-tenant environment. It's not only that, it's multinational. So how do I create applications or environments, better yet, that are supporting not only, you know, a commonality for our warfighters, but what's a good commonality for, you know, our NATO partners or, you know, like Five Eyes, for example, or something like that, where it's like, we need to build these and build these for test environments.
And yes, we're going to still have to train these or do these within a data center. But now, how do I make a repeatable, mutable, hardened? Because, I mean, there's so many things that come into play in our thing that I could take these applications, go out somewhere, and, you know, even touching on the ATO portion of it is, so now I've developed it, how can I make that now faster and easier to take this to any region, any warfighter, and then ATO it as quickly as possible?
That's right. Yeah. So...
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
And that all gets into, I think, you know, maybe what we're going to spend a couple minutes in talking about is modular open systems architecture, right? And we've heard most recently, just in the last few years now, the problem of war, reemphasizing that. And, you know, and I had, you know, again, in my former role as CIO, was a big proponent for MOSA and SOSA.
And in the Army, we have what's called the CMOS standards for C5ISR. And always an interesting conversation to have, you know, with industry, to hear their perspectives on it. For me, as somebody that's been on both sides of the fence, both working in government and industry, gives me the ability to view it from both perspectives. And I still am a strong believer in MOSA, right?
And I honestly do believe that it gives our DOW a competitive advantage. It is not a disadvantage. There's often this misconception that, you know, moving towards standardization and, you know, open architectures means somehow that you're diluting your architecture that you're, you know, somehow it's suboptimal.
But yet, when you look at, you know, how we fight our threat environments and how we need to adapt and be flexible, you know, to meet those threat environments, absolutely the only way we can do that is through MOSA principles, right? And, for example, we just talked about leveraging, you know, containers and when you build it, when you build it using, you know, Kubernetes standards and, you know, and other standards that gives you interoperability, not just within our joint force, but with our allies and partners, you know, to me, there is no better way to achieve interoperability than try and do it, you know, leveraging these, you know, these ways.
Now, that's different from, you know, talking about data standards, right? So, for a long time, I think the DOW has talked about, you know, using NATO standards and STANAGs and all that stuff. And I think that era, while, you know, will continue to be important, I think where we're seeing the technology and how that's moving, there's different ways to achieve interoperability today through open architectures where some of the emphasis in the past around data standards, you know, is no longer that important anymore.
For example, if you're able to, you know, turn every data that needs to be shared and exchanged, you know, and you're able to do that using APIs or leveraging microservices architecture, you know, how the data itself is structured as a standard is much less relevant, right? If you're able to actually move that data and you can do that using APIs or microservices. So, really, you know, it's a great time to be where we're seeing the software modernization and most of principles come together in a truly unique way that's innovative and is the right thing to do, you know, for us in the DOW.
[Mark Perry]
That's perfect. And I know we keep going on and I could probably always piggyback on exactly, you know, the feedback you're giving right now. But I think as, you know, because we're probably getting close to time and everything else and I would love to spend even more and more and more.
So, I think the last thing is, and I think this kind of shows it right here. Us sitting together, you know, one completely different what I went in the military in the 90s and did as an infantry guy, but we're both sitting here now in the industry supporting this two different companies, two different type of, you know, when we think about it, you know, the hardware data set side and supplying this hardware at the edge in along with the, you know, I would say that open software that you have within Brick AI and then working with someone like SpectraCloud and others in the industry. What I'm bringing this back to is, I think that's where everybody needs to understand is we win. Just like when I was in the army as an infantry guy, we won better as a team.
And to be able to support, you know, the war fighters and the nations and everything else, we need to come together, build something that is built off of that MOSA principle and let's build that interoperability that, you know, designed for disconnected first, that open support for legacy and big, especially on your guys' side, you don't have one. There's no, like you said earlier, there's not one size fits all. You create something or a product that can be used modular and grow as you need or, hey, let's go big now if you need to.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
Yeah. And this gets into, you know, how we're seeing industry respond to this, right? So, you know, it used to be that in the past we had large system integrators essentially, you know, control the architecture.
You know, they would come up with it. They would own it. They would bring a bunch of, you know, subcontractors to work under them and comply with the architecture, right?
And at the end of the day, you still got something that was very much vertically integrated, very much, you know, even though I won't use the word proprietary, I would still say something that was just not very flexible enough for us to, you know, make any changes to the architecture. I think what we're seeing the shift now is exactly what we're doing, right? You know, I didn't know you guys and you didn't know us guys.
But then, you know, when we looked at how we were architecting our products for this based on most of principles and modularity, it makes it easier for us to team and partner, right? So, we're creating this coalition of the willing to say it's like, hey, you know, there are unique ways in which we can now work together and integrate because we follow the same common principles. And at the end of the day, we only have one objective in mind, right?
We're just making sure that our joint force is successful every single day, right? That is our only objective. And if we put that objective and make that as our number one priority, right, how everything else that we do behind the scenes in terms of how we work together, how we integrate our products, you know, all that becomes easier because we follow the same, you know, foundational principles from a technical perspective.
And we have the same ethos when it comes to, you know, what matters to us. And for us, you know, making sure the joint warfighter is successful is what matters to us, right? So, between those two principles, I think this is now enabling, you know, a whole new set of partners to come together, to work together in some unique ways without the government or one large system integrator telling you what to do and how to do it.
I think this is how we get to some tremendous innovation, right? And we're starting to see that. And it's exciting to see how, you know, industries react to this.
Yeah, that's perfect.
[Mark Perry]
And I mean, I think that's probably a great roundup right there. And I couldn't be happier to work with folks like you. I mean, I'm learning a lot, which I love, by the way.
And, you know, if I ever had to leave a tidbit for anybody is, as we make this, you can't just be blinded and stay in your lane, get out of your lane, talk to a lot of the ones out there that have either accomplished it, been a part of it, or have had to live this from day to day from the operators to the ones at the top that have to make those decisions. Yeah. And I think you nailed it.
You know, keeping that ethos within the industry and how we act and how we bring things to market, I think is big.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
Yeah. And, you know, I mean, I think so some challenge back to both industry and government, right? One is reimagine the edge.
It is not the edge is not what it used to be five years ago or even two years ago. Yeah, it is evolving. It's changing.
And it offers a tremendous opportunity to really do things in a different way to, you know, is your architecture truly modular? Is it truly open where you're able to make these rapid adjustments, you know, as you you know, as you as you respond to the threat environment, because carrying a bunch of gear that was built five years ago for a different threat environment today, which is inflexible for today is not is not going to make us more more powerful. So that's two.
Third is, you know, as much as, you know, I was responsible for the Army's cloud strategy and implementation of the cloud and we pushed for being cloud first. You know, today the game is the cloud is a nice to have. Right.
You cannot count on having cloud at the edge and you cannot count on your operations reliant on consistent connectivity back to the cloud or to any fixed data center for that matter. Right. And if your architecture involves that, the first thing you got to do is cut all those pieces out.
OK, throw them out of your architecture. Look at what's left and say, OK, if this is what my squad, my company, you know, my unit has to go out and has to survive and be lethal. Is that good enough?
And if it's not good enough, I'm sorry, your architecture is broke. Right. And that's important.
And fourth is, you know, you got to continue to work in this kind of mixed mode of working with some legacy systems because they're going to be around for a while. It's not going away. But for you to work in a mixed mode environment where you have legacy and you're modernizing new applications at the same time means that, you know, you're still going to have to look at, you know, decoupling these things.
Right. If you are, you know, how what's the best way to take a take a legacy application and then, you know, ensure that it's integrating and working with the hardware that you want that you have. And that's, you know, that's going to be that's going to be something that continues to happen because there is no rip and replace approach.
Right. There's not, you know, it's impossible for what we're doing in the DOW today to just say it's like, hey, let's just throw all the stuff out and we're going to get brand new stuff and starting January 1st of next year, everybody's going to have something brand new. Doesn't happen.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
Right.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
So that's the reality of the edge. Right. So, you know, it amazed me that every time I would, you know, go out and meet with our units in my former role, you know, discussions that we would talk about, things that we would talk about and strategize and plan at the Pentagon and the realities of the edge and what the soldier would have and the gear that they would have to fight with every single day.
That disconnect was so huge that it was mind boggling to me. Right. You know, here we are talking about all of these great things, pie in the sky.
And yet the reality on the ground was different. And we have to converge that. And we got to get those, you know, in the hands of every single soldier, you know, as quickly as possible.
And for industry to come together to make this happen, you know, and I think it's truly exciting times to be.
[Mark Perry]
Yeah. I mean, you could say it's funny because I'm so glad you kind of jumped in it because that was going to be my last thought. What, especially within your former role, I was going to ask you, like, what, what can we do better?
And, you know, I see that I just got to say something about it is there's always a huge disconnect when, you know, you need the people up there having the big ideas and go, this is what I would love to accomplish in that pie in the sky. And like, you know, and just to be able to get anywhere, but then you've got to be able to take it down to someone and go, hey, is this possible? No, there's no way we can do that.
If we do that, that's going to be two years from now.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
Yeah.
[Mark Perry]
Okay. What can I remove or do to make, to get as close as possible to the reality for you? And I think that's for me, when I think about what we could always do better is just that not build it to, oh, this, I got it.
This is what we're going to build. No, like go ask someone, say, you know, what, what is actually needed?
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
Yeah.
[Mark Perry]
And I'm not gonna lie. That's, that's what really drew, you know, when, when I met you and you went in your Potter, I was like, oh, that was seriously built for the edge. Yes.
I was like that. And, and I'm like, and it's not like lock you in and say, hey, I'm giving you something that depending on what your mission set is, it will accommodate.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And listen, I mean, so for years we've seen everybody hype the word edge, right? Now everybody wants to hype the word edge AI. And, and so, you know, I think for us as a company, we've stayed focused on true to the principles of, okay, when you talk about the edge, the definition of the edge is, you know, one it's moving, right.
And it could be, you know, a striker that's moving. It could be, you know, a fixed wing aircraft. It could be a rotary wing.
It could be a submarine, but it's something that's on the move, right. Where you're always going to be challenged with power constraints. You're never going to have enough power to run everything you need.
It's going to have to be in an environment that's harsh, right. So, you know, moisture, humidity, high temperatures, low temperatures, it's going to have to operate in that environment. It's going to have to operate, you know, in, you know, with, with no, no networks, right.
With no networks, not, not a detail environment, literally no networks. And and so to us, that is the definition. So when we build our brick products, you know, we, we looked at that as our, essentially what we call the swap C envelope, right.
The swap C envelope, size, weight, and power cost is that envelope. And how do we optimize that for the edge without trading off performance? Because again, that is the biggest challenge in industry.
Yes, you can get all of that. But at the end of the day, now, if you're going to have something that's much less processing power, much less storage, well, that's not good enough, right. You want, you want the best of both.
And so we've been fortunate, you know, to come up with the right technology, the IP around sayings like, okay, how do we maximize throughput? How do we run AI workloads in these harsh environments with the right form factors? And yet to be able to do that with minimal power, you know, requirements.
Because again, the days of lugging around, you know, massive amounts of fuel with you and generators, you know, is going to be long gone. Because again, you know, if you have to be really expeditionary, you want to really be on the move. If you can minimize the, you know, your footprint of not just, you know, the power and logistics that goes behind it, but your IT footprint, where you can take something like a brick, throw it into the back of your Humvee, connected to your onboard power.
You continue to operate, you know, when the Humvee shuts down, no problem. You still have battery backup, you know, on the device. It's continuing to run.
It's continuing to work. You pick it up, hand carry it, you know, with one hand, take it back, you know, move into another, you know, into a command post, take it out, move it into a striker. You want that level of data migration and modularity, right?
And if you can do that in that rugged environment, now you solve the problem. And to me, I remember Adi, you know, just over five years ago when we were at the Pentagon talking about all these things, to us, that was a holy grail. And I do believe now that we've gotten there.
[Mark Perry]
Wow. Yeah. That's a big change that quickly.
And, you know, just to add harsh environments, by the way, you know, I was a private before, so that attributes to those harsh environments. You've got to build stuff that go in the hands of, you know, I don't want to say like using the word common soldier, but a soldier that, you know, that quick time to value. It's got to be built not only for harsh environments, but to be easy to use by a soldier and being able to throw it.
You were lying when you said throw it in Humvee. I was like, that's what we do. That's what we do.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
Yeah. And this is where, you know, where people try to say, it's like, oh, I got a server that I built for a data center and then I'm going to ruggedize it, right? And then somehow I'm going to be able to take this and, you know, mount it onto my Humvee.
Well, we know the reality isn't that, right? You know, I mean, those data center servers are built to operate in a different set of conditions. You know, they need clean environments to run, you know, the temperature has got to be controlled.
And that's why, you know, all data centers have, you know, massive amounts of power that go into HVAC and cooling, you know, for those servers. So kid yourself not by saying it's like somehow you can ruggedize that and run it, you know, on your Humvee. No, you can't.
It requires a completely different design and architectural approach. And then the other point you made about, you know, keeping the simple, you know, you know, KISS, keep it simple and stupid, right? That 100% has to apply here.
KISS principles have to apply because at the end of the day, I think, you know, our war fighter at the edge, life is complicated enough for them already. And if your new tech and your new gear is just going to add more complexity to them, to me, that's a no-go, non-starter, right? Absolutely.
So in fact, you know, I mean, you know, we kid ourselves by saying it's like, oh, the reason why we call our product the brick, because it's got to be as dumb as a brick. Okay. And, you know, I mean, you throw, you know.
I'm going to use that now.
[Mark Perry]
Yeah.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
I mean, you know, is anybody delicate with a brick? You know, you throw them around, right? And so, and it's contained.
It's, you know, it's, you know, it's easy to use. It's, you know, it doesn't need a lot of care and feeding and attention and doesn't need a lot of delicate, you know, handling. And that's how it needs to be.
But while at the same time, it's got to be that it's easy plug and play. You know, where, you know, and if something does need to be repaired on the field, it's got to be something that all you need is a screwdriver and any private should be able to open it up and say, it's like, okay, I pulled this component out. I put this one in and I throw it back in my Humvee and I'm, and I'm gone.
Right. And you shouldn't have IT technicians. You need, you shouldn't have to have FSRs in the field, you know, to manage these tactical edge devices in the field.
It's got to be there, you know, built rugged, but when things do fail, a screwdriver is all you should need. And, and if that's not what you're building your products for, I'm sorry. Like that's no, no, you know, that's not a good way to support the soldier today.
[Mark Perry]
That's it. So you guys are, you know, we have our orders. I mean, that's it right there.
That's what we need to do. So I appreciate the time today. Oh, thank you.
I would love to do this multiple times with you because I think there's a lot more we could talk about. And even though we're at that, you know, kind of crossroads right now where edge is out there and we're talking about it. Now we talk about the tactical edge.
I think there's still a lot of education that has to happen. So I appreciate the time again today.
[Dr. Raj Iyer]
Thank you. Really, really enjoyed the conversation. And for everybody that's listening today, you know, reach out to us to hear more and, you know, to talk about the opportunities that, you know, where we can support our warfighter.
There's so much we can do together as industry. And we don't need the DOW to tell us what to do. It's up to us to take solutions to them.
We're standing by. We have a great partnership here. And we're ready to bring more people onto this coalition.
So let's go do this, folks.
[Anthony Jimenez]
Perfect. Well said. Thank you.
Appreciate it. Thanks for listening. And thank you to our guests, Mark Perry and Dr. Raj Iyer. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe to CarahCast. And be sure to listen to our other discussions. If you’d like more information on how Spectro Cloud and TSecond can assist your organization, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at spectrocloud@carahsoft.com or tsecond@carahsoft.com.
Thanks again for listening and have a great day.