Tenix eyes simulation marketplace

Australia's biggest defence contractor, Tenix Defence Systems, has its sights set on a growing share of the emerging simulation and modelling market.
When Tenix sold off its main aerospace manufacturing arm, Hawker de Havilland, to Boeing many commentators assumed that the company was seeking to withdraw from the aerospace industry. Not so: according to managing director Paul Salteri, Tenix was re-positioning itself as an aerospace industry player.

The aerospace-related skills and capabilities which Tenix had either developed in-house or had acquired through purchases of BTR Aerospace, Hawker de Havilland's Systems Division and Vision Abell remain in the Tenix Defence Systems armoury and a key component is the company's growing simulation and modelling expertise.

Tenix is building up its simulation business incrementally with most of its 20 specialist staff divided between its Sydney and Adelaide (formerly Vision Abell) offices. According to simulation business development manager Tony Landers, Tenix has no ambition to compete with established manufacturers of six-axis full flight simulators such as CAE, but will focus on niche areas and the creation of a broad enough technology base to act as a credible Australian Industry Involvement (AII) partner in both development and through life support.

So the company is teamed with Agusta and CAE Inc to supply and support the A129 Scorpion flight simulator in the Army's Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter (ARH) project, for which tenders closed on April 30.

It has secured small but significant contracts in Australia for commercial and military related simulation tasks. And it has also secured some important export contracts resulting from a strategic decision to become a subject matter expert on applications of HLA (High Level Architecture) in distributed simulation systems.

With the US Department of Defence mandating HLA as the dominant technical architecture for its individual and force-wide simulation environment, other countries are expected to follow suit and Tenix has positioned itself to secure a significant market share in Australia.

Tenix has established a close relationship with Florida-based simulation firm Raydon, which is one of the biggest suppliers of armoured vehicle precision gunnery trainers to the US Department of Defence. The two firms had teamed originally to offer a Crew Procedural Trainer for the Australian Army's light armoured vehicles (ASLAV). Building on that relationship, the Tenix and Raydon team is supplying the US Marine Corps with precision gunnery trainers that include a Tenix developed semi-automated force (SAF) system, six new terrain models and that are networked using HLA.

Three of these terrain models are designed to represent normal optical weapon sight
The Raydon/Tenix approach has been highly successful: the team's design has now been adopted by the US Marine Corps as the design baseline for all of its appended gunnery trainers - that is, for all simulators designed to 'plug-in' to a standard vehicle or weapon.

Potentially more significantly, Raydon has been named as a member of a panel of simulation specialists eligible to carry out simulation and modelling tasks under the US Army's STRICOM Omnibus Contract (STOC) program which is expected to be worth up to US$4 billion over the coming five years. Tenix is part of Raydon's team on this panel, which is similar in concept to Australia's DPSI panel, and so has potential access to significant amounts of US work and new technology in coming years.

Tenix is also a player in the Australian Army's Army Synthetic Environment (ASE) program at Puckapunyal. The Army Synthetic Environment (ASE) is a management infrastructure that will enable Army to efficiently and effectively integrate selected simulations into a single environment. Tenix is working with the Army to design an open, non-proprietary simulation architecture that embraces such standards as HLA.

Tenix is also developing the operational training system for the AMSTAR Ground Surveillance Radar (GSR) which it is supplying under Project Ninox. Prime contractor for Ninox GSR is Racal Australia and Tenix is developing the trainer, and some sensor modifications, as a sub-contractor. These are likely to find their way into the global market as Racal's parent company, Thales Sensors (UK), sells variants of this radar and its UK counterpart, MSTAR, worldwide.

Tenix is positioning itself to bid for the Phase 1 prime contract for Army's Combat Training Centre (CTC) program, Project Land 134, for which an RFP is expected later this year. The company is teamed with STN Atlas, offering a variant of the newly installed German Army solution for Land 134. Tenix aims to support the simulation technology involved as well as offering other logistic support and project management expertise resident within the broader Tenix Group.

For the RAN Tenix delivered in September last year an Acoustic Data Recorder/Manual Radar Controller (ADR/MRC) for the Seahawk flight simulator at RANAS Nowra under a contract direct from the RAN. The company is also a player in DSTO's Virtual Ship integration laboratory, with Sydney-based systems architect Rob Zeltzer a member of the Virtual Ship Architecture Working Group. Tenix has supplied the Virtual Ship's Infra Red Search & Track (IRST) federate model and integrated this into the system's architecture using HLA.

Tenix is prime contractor on Sea 1430, the Navy's Hydrographic Database project, and sees this as an opportunity down the track to showcase its 3-Dimensional visualisation capabilities. It is these, along with its HLA expertise, which give Tenix a competitive advantage in the simulation and modelling area, says Tony Landers.

The 3-D visualisation capabilities are a natural by-product of the internal R&D carried out by Tenix Defence Systems as part of its product design and tender development processes. Visualisation, to allow fly-throughs and 3-D representations of objects, spaces and spatial relationships, is an essential design and development tool and the company has developed its own image generator software to support this in-house resource. This capability has obvious applications in other areas of simulation and modelling, hence Tenix's interest in the Army's Synthetic Environment and Project Land 134.

It also supports other parts of the Tenix business, such as Electronic Warfare, where accurate terrain databases are a vital part of the infrastructure supporting the company's R&D into moving map displays in Task 5 of the US-Australia EW project arrangement (PA)10.

At present, says Tony Landers, the training market still dominates the simulation and modelling sector; but he predicts that both in Australia and globally, that system modelling/visualisation to support system development projects will outstrip the training market within five years or so.

The company has been preparing itself for this market growth by diversifying into non-defence markets for its modelling and simulation skills. For the NSW Environmental Protection Agency it has developed a 3-D model which provides a visualisation of predictions of the volume and direction of nitrous oxide emissions from the state's power stations. And for another, undisclosed, customer it has developed a 3-D 'fly-through' visualisation for a still-secret transport project that was used by the customer for market research purposes.

A major growth area within the defence market is what Landers terms 'analysis-led acquisition'. Recent projects such as Wedgetail and Air 87 have seen Defence's Capability Systems Division and DSTO undertake extensive modelling and operational analysis to determine operational requirements for new capabilities and to test and evaluate both operational concepts and tender responses. This aspect of capability development and acquisition is growing fast, Landers told ADM, and Defence is increasingly asking contractors to provide similar modelling and analytical data to support both requirements definition and validate performance and effectiveness claims.

Primes will increasingly find that without such an in-house capability it will find be harder to sell their products and services to customers like Defence.

The simulation business within Tenix has grown from a 4-man operation 18 months ago to a 20-man enterprise today, and turns over what Landers describes as 'single figure millions'. It forms a single enabling layer across the entire company, supporting its external customers' traditional simulation and training needs as well as providing an in-house modelling and simulation capability to help the company's divisions develop and sell products and services. In that sense it is both a profit centre and a cost centre.

If Tenix's simulation group meets all its targets in this market sector Landers predicts 100 per cent revenue growth over the next five years or so, but cautions that the size of the defence simulation and modelling market in Australia sets a very definite limit on the growth of companies in this sector which don't seek exports or diversify into civil markets.

By Gregor Ferguson, Adelaide