Five Questions With: Dennis McLaughlin

DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN is president of Rite-Solutions Inc., a service-disabled veteran-owned small business specializing in systems and software engineering for government and commercial clients. / COURTESY RITE-SOLUTIONS INC.
DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN is president of Rite-Solutions Inc., a service-disabled veteran-owned small business specializing in systems and software engineering for government and commercial clients. / COURTESY RITE-SOLUTIONS INC.

Dennis McLaughlin, president of Middletown-based Rite-Solutions Inc., a service-disabled veteran-owned small business specializing in systems and software engineering for government and commercial clients, talks about the company’s recent expansion to Virginia Beach and the kind of work it does in support of the U.S. Navy.
PBN: Tell me why the company wanted to expand to Virginia Beach.
MCLAUGHLIN:
More than 80 percent of the Rite-Solutions’ business is in support of the U.S. Navy, specifically in undersea warfare. Virginia Beach is a natural location for us as we expand our offering to include surface warfare systems. The Hampton Roads area is the home of an enormous USN surface fleet concentration. As with any fleet concentration area, several naval activities that provide technical support are home-ported in this area, including the Combat System Direction Authority (our customer, part of the Naval Surface Warfare Center), the Military Sealift Command and a detachment of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center that reports to headquarters here in Newport. There are also numerous potential business partners located in the area.
PBN: How many locations does Rite-Solutions have now and how many employees?
MCLAUGHLIN:
Rite-Solutions currently has four offices, including our corporate office just outside of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport. Smaller offices are located in Pawcatuck, Conn.; Washington, D.C.; and the newest location in Virginia Beach. We also have employees working at customer sites in Fair Lakes, Va.; San Diego; and Huntsville, Ala. As one would guess, we are primarily located where the Navy is. In the past year we’ve experienced some fairly significant growth and now have over 220 employees, including about 50 part-time employees. In fact, one exciting development in the company is the facility expansion we are experiencing in Middletown, adding over 5,000 square feet of office, conference room and laboratory space, which we think will be of particular value to our customers.
PBN: Can you explain what Rite-Solutions does and what kind of clients it serves?
MCLAUGHLIN:
Rite-Solutions Inc. is a systems and software engineering firm serving both government and commercial clients. We are a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business, so we are naturally inclined to pursue defense work. Rite-Solutions is noted for developing innovative solutions that provide sustained, informed and decisive information apace or ahead of any adversary or competitor – what we call the Information AdvantageTM. This concept applies to everything we develop – from visionary Combat Systems of the Future prototypes, to mobile workforce applications to support field technicians servicing complex medical equipment, to our learning and performance management tools. We have been in business delivering the Information Advantage for 16 years.

Rite-Solutions has repeatedly demonstrated the unique value proposition we represent to our customers as a small, agile, technically astute developer of complex systems – development efforts that are also characterized by disciplined, repeatable processes. We provide mission-critical systems development and integration, web-based e-commerce solutions, real-time simulation environments, enterprise-scale, highly reliable transaction processing systems, 3-D data visualization, encryption, and computer-based training, across all life cycle phases. Our experience includes development of key elements of the submarine combat system software. Our combat systems development and integration knowledge and our commercial sector work demands the use of open source code, model-based systems engineering, testing with open-source and commercial test tools, and Service Oriented Architectures. We are also researching potential implementation approaches for organic cyber defense through our Small Business Innovative Research work.
Another characteristic of Rite-Solutions that separates us from other small businesses in our industry is a mature program management approach that ensures successful technical, personnel, administrative, financial and managerial performance. Our Program Management Office, with its internal checks and balances, reduces the risk to our clients associated with awarding mission critical systems contracts to Rite-Solutions, ensuring tasks will be professionally and expertly managed and executed.
PBN: The company recently retained its status as a Capability Maturity Model Integration Level 3 organization. Can you talk a little about what that means for clients?
MCLAUGHLIN:
Combined with our small business agility, CMMI Level 3 is a huge difference maker in providing value to our clients. Retaining our CMMI Level 3 appraisal demonstrates to both our government and commercial customers that our software is developed using documented, controlled and repeatable processes. Significantly, during a second appraisal, a firm is required to demonstrate continuous improvement, and provide a plan for further future improvement. CMMI Level 3 ensures our customers that, though we’re small, we have the discipline to develop high-quality software products, and are constantly seeking to improve. This is especially important in mission-critical software development for our government and commercial clients where we consistently demonstrate that we measure up to large businesses, while our small-business overheads allow us to, in many cases, provide greater value.
PBN: How large a part of your business is cybersecurity?
MCLAUGHLIN:
With all the emphasis on cybersecurity in the past few years, just about everything we touch has a cybersecurity component to it. For new systems, our tools and processes ensure that cybersecurity is ‘baked-in’ during the initial development process. We are certainly building cybersecurity into the systems we produce. Older systems that don’t have cybersecurity built in from inception need help with cybersecurity and we work with these legacy systems to achieve cybersecurity goals. We provide cybersecurity and IT solutions to many of our customers. We do a large amount of specific work involving strictly cybersecurity for our NUWC client as the prime contractor supporting NUWC’s network infrastructure and organic laboratories … About 35 percent of our business base involves all-cyber, all the time. The work entails design, development and implementation of IT infrastructure management and cybersecurity solutions for tactical and non-tactical IT systems.

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