FACE Consortium Publishes First Standard for Defense Avionics Systems

By Judy Cerenzia, The Open Group FACE Consortium

I’m amazed that only 19 months ago we kicked off The Open Group Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) Consortium, a collaborative group of avionics industry and U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force contributors who are working to develop standards for a common operating environment to support portable capability applications across Department of Defense (DoD) avionics systems. Our goal is to create an avionics software environment on installed computing hardware of war-fighting platforms that enables FACE applications and components to be deployed on different platforms without impact to the FACE applications. This approach to portable applications and interoperability will reduce development and integration costs and reduce the time to field new avionics capabilities.

I’m particularly proud of the consortium’s Technical Working Group, authors of Version 1.0 of The Technical Standard for Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) Reference Architecture, which was just approved for official publication as an Open Group Standard. What they have accomplished in a year and a half is nothing less than phenomenal. The publication is available at The Open Group’s Bookstore.

The FACE Consortium’s unique strategy and structure is changing the way government and industry do business by breaking down barriers to portability—exchanging proprietary solutions for a common and standardized computing environment and components. To enable this climate change, the consortium’s Business Working Group has also published the FACE Business Guide, which defines stakeholders and their roles within a new business model; discusses business scenarios and defines how stakeholders will impact or be impacted by business drivers in each; and investigates how contract terms, software licensing agreements and IP rights may need to change to support procuring common components with standardized interfaces versus a proprietary black-box solution from a prime contractor. The Business Guide is also available at The Open Group’s Bookstore.

We’ve grown from 74 individuals representing 14 organizations in June 2010 to over 375 participants from 39 government and industry partners to date. Our next consortium members’ meeting will be in Baltimore, MD February 29 – March 1 2012, hosted by Northrop Grumman. I’m looking forward to seeing FACE colleagues, facilitating their working meeting, and continuing our mission to develop, evolve and publish a realistic open FACE™ architecture, standards and business model, and robust industry conformance program that will be supported and adopted by FACE customers, vendors, and integrators.

Judy Cerenzia is currently The Open Group’s Program Director for the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Consortium. Judy has 10+ years senior program management experience leading cross-functional and cross-organizational teams to reach consensus, define, and meet business and technical goals during project lifecycles.