Tom Santos is chief technology officer of Rite-Solutions, based in Middletown. The company’s more than 200 employees create mission-critical software for the government and commercial clients. The company has announced the Automated Protocol Translator, opening up new lines of communication between computers.
PBN: What are some of the challenges that integration maintenance can cause for certain industries?
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SANTOS: Getting systems, computers and software to talk with each other can be extremely complex and time-consuming. It’s a moving target. Interfaces, standards and methods of communication are always changing as systems add new capabilities and use new standards and technologies. Often the communication protocols are proprietary to the system developer. As system complexity and the number of interfaces increase, such as with the internet of things, the amount of software devoted to address interoperability challenges also increases. In turn, this results in increased development, integration and test time – and drives up overall software maintenance costs.
PBN: Would it be accurate to describe Automated Protocol Translator as a shortcut to get different systems to work together?
SANTOS: Exactly. … Our customers often want to replace obsolete interface technologies with new communications protocols, but the cost and effort to do that is usually very high. More importantly, our [U.S.] Navy customers need to develop and deploy new capabilities faster to address changing mission needs. We received a Small Business Innovation Research Phase II.5 award from the Navy to develop a new approach – our Automated Protocol Translator – and the results have been impressive. We can rapidly provide the shortcut needed for systems using different protocols to communicate and work together.
PBN: Why is using APT a cost advantage?
SANTOS: The software needed for two systems or components to communicate with each other is automatically generated by our tool. No manual coding is needed. Second, there is no need to modify or redesign existing or legacy systems. APT’s interface software is easily added to or removed from these systems. This significantly reduces system/software integration time and effort. Lastly, we found (not unexpectedly) that we need fewer people than previous manual software-development methods … [it] freed up our senior engineers to work on other more-complex or difficult assignments.
PBN: Coding is widely seen as a time-consuming endeavor. Can you explain how it was handled before, manually, and how APT tackles this task?
SANTOS: That is the way we, and everyone else, did it in the past. We have metrics to prove how costly and time-consuming code generation is. Conversely, we collected the same metrics to show that APT significantly reduced our cost in developing the same capabilities. As mentioned, the significant reduction (50 percent to 75 percent) in cost is associated with having the tool to auto-generate software and reduce integration time. However, it shouldn’t go unnoticed that the quality of the auto-generated code is better.
PBN: Rite-Solutions is a service disabled veteran-owned small business. Does this fact resonate with your government and military software clients?
SANTOS: Absolutely. Our government and military software clients recognize the contributions of veterans in the service of our country by providing set-aside opportunities to service disabled veteran-owned small businesses [such as] Rite-Solutions. Being a small business does not mean that we are limited in capability or expertise. In fact, people are often surprised to learn that Rite-Solutions is not a larger organization. We have an impressive concentration of engineers, scientists and technologists not typically found in a small business.
Susan Shalhoub is a PBN contributing writer.
