Sigma Defense wins $102M Navy shipboard engineering contract

Sigma Defense has won a potential five-year, $102.5 million contract for engineering services in support of the Navy’s main program for continuous upgrades of networks onboard surface ships.

Work under the contract will involve technical and programmatic services to aid in the current operations of and future plans for the Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services program, in full production since December 2022.

The Pentagon’s Friday awards digest says Navy officials received two proposals for the contract and selected the bid from Solute, which Sigma Defense acquired in January 2022.

CANES is how the Navy envisions its future tactical system that brings together five legacy shipboard networks into a more singular environment for command, control, intelligence and logistics applications.

Navy leaders structured the CANES program to have a rolling baseline approach for integrating commercially available products and systems into its network.

Sigma Defense will also focus its work on communications and computer systems, as well as related certification and information assurance functions.

Noblis inherited its incumbency on the current contract via the 2021 acquisition of McKean Defense Group, which won the work in 2020. The Navy has obligated $61 million in order volume to-date ahead of the Oct. 7 expiration date, according to GovTribe data.

Solicitation documents released in November 2023 outline these technology areas as of interest to the Navy for CANES:

• Network design and development
• Network monitoring
• Common computing environment
• Infrastructure, both hardware and software components
• Cloud computing
• Ashore and afloat data centers and server hosting environments
• Consolidated network enterprise services
• Wireless networking
• Cybersecurity engineering
• Software engineering and automation
• Tactical and satellite communications.