Ottawa’s Calian Group and Invest Ottawa announced Tuesday the Northstar Defence Lab, a facility at the Area X.O research complex where Canadian companies can plug their defence technologies together and test them as one system. It is the first lab in Calian’s planned national network.
Calian will build and operate the lab, the release says, running it on ATHORA, the interoperability platform it announced in May. Invest Ottawa, which founded and runs Area X.O, also uses the Greenbelt site as a test centre for NATO’s DIANA accelerator for turning commercial technology into military use.
The release says the founding ecosystem partners include ADGA, Anvil, Cohere, Evertz Microsystems, Larus, TACTIQL, Tessellate Robotics and 123 Cyber. Export Development Canada takes part as an industry commercialization partner. Several have announced partnerships with Calian before: ADGA, on Army training simulators; Cohere, on artificial intelligence; and TACTIQL, on sensor-data software.
The lab is “a tangible next step” in the initiative Calian announced Jan. 26 to mobilize an initial $100 million for sovereign C5ISRT (command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting) capabilities. C5ISRT is the military’s shorthand for the systems that link sensors, networks and commanders.
The release does not say how much of the $100 million has been committed, how much is Calian’s own or what the lab costs. Calian said in January the money would come from several sources, among them its Calian VENTURES arm, which helps small Canadian firms sell to the Armed Forces.
The Globe and Mail reported the total would be shared among Calian, private investors and federal and provincial governments, and that chief executive Patrick Houston named Ottawa among the likely sites for its first labs.
Houston told the Globe the labs target a familiar problem: the Armed Forces often like a company’s technology but struggle to buy it because it does not work with what they already run. Calian can profit when a partner firm wins a contract using Calian’s systems, he said, and otherwise acts as orchestrator. The release does not say whether a partner’s technology must work with ATHORA to take part.
“Northstar is being designed around the mission, not around any one product or company,” Calian’s president of defence and space, Chris Pogue, said in the release.