Ralph Guevarez:
Hello and welcome to Mercury Now, a podcast series brought to you by Mercury Systems. I am your host, Ralph Guevarez. Thank you for joining us. Mercury's Rappid platform was just announced, and I have an expert here to tell us a bit more about a new standard of flexibility. My guest and I are going to discuss what Rappid is and what benefits adopters can experience. Joining me is Nick Koranda, the product line director behind this technology at Mercury Systems. Nick, good day, and welcome to the show.
Nick Koranda:
Hi, Ralph. And thanks for having me.
Ralph Guevarez:
My pleasure, Nick. Thank you. Let's start with a bit of a background regarding your area of expertise. Shall we? Could you please briefly tell our listeners about your role at Mercury?
Nick Koranda:
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm the director for our tactical product line at Spectrum Systems. So it's my responsibility to deliver products to our customers and ultimately the war fighter. I like to think of it is if I'm delivering value to them, I'm doing my job right then.
Ralph Guevarez:
That's great, Nick, and I agree with you 100%. Let's get into the discussion. Could you please tell our listeners what Rappid is and more importantly, who did we design it for?
Nick Koranda:
Yeah, sure. So with the introduction of smartphones and apps, the military is really seeing the many benefits of that same methodology. The military wants to use systems for multiple missions. Traditionally, systems are developed with a single focus in mind. So we see much more interest in systems that can serve many purposes with that same hardware set. So Mercury Rappid is a framework that enables our customers and EW application developers to realize systems like this.
Ralph Guevarez:
Thank you, Nick. Could you tell me a bit more about those three key components: Open software, open hardware and open firmware please?
Nick Koranda:
Yes, of course. So the industry has made great strides in introducing open solutions in the area of hardware and software. You can see that specifically with open VPX and SOSA hardware. Likewise, there are many tools such as Docker, which provide open solutions for software development. So Rappid embraces the standards I just mentioned and more. In the area of firmware though, I think there's the greatest challenge to being open and that's why we've introduced a framework called Open FPGA, which enables open and reusable development of firmware applications. So Rappid now takes all of the available open standards and adds in open FPGA and so that provides all three areas of openness: Hardware, software and firmware together to provide what I feel is a very powerful solution set for system development.
Ralph Guevarez:
Now that is very impressive. That has to also come with a lot of benefits. Do you mind diving a bit more into what those benefits are?
Nick Koranda:
Yeah, definitely. So Rappid provides benefits in all of the major life cycle areas of system acquisition, specifically development, deployment and sustainment. I believe the best way to illustrate those benefits of Rappid is to leave our listeners with a phrase and to plant a vision in their mind. The phrase is develop once, deploy anywhere. When we enable our customers to reuse their proprietary applications and algorithms and reuse hardware systems for multiple missions, the benefits in the area of reduced development time, risk and cost, those are obvious when those benefits cross all of those acquisition areas I mentioned. With that in mind, if you can imagine the electronic warfare community introducing in a sense an ecosystem of EW iPhones, where they can load applications as needed, load those applications across multiple platforms, you really streamline the delivery of capabilities to the war fighter.
Ralph Guevarez:
Impressive again. Now, I know this was just announced recently, but are there products currently available that leverage this platform?
Nick Koranda:
Yes, we certainly do. We have two products that we've recently introduced in our modular processing system family called the MPS1101 and 1202. They're both platforms that have all of the processing that you would expect in a system like this, specifically CPU, FPGA and RF processing. And those systems are both enabled with the Rappid platform. These are rugged systems that are application-ready and easily taken out into the field or flown on an airborne platform. In addition, we're going to be introducing a third product soon that I'm real excited about in the area of rack mount equipment for lab and semi-rugged use such as a vehicle. All of these products, in addition to what I just mentioned, also leverage a library of middleware applications to reduce development time even further for our customers.
Ralph Guevarez:
Where should we point our listeners who are looking for more information please?
Nick Koranda:
Yeah, definitely. So we have a full, dedicated web page to showcase our Rappid technology on our mercury.com website. You can go directly to it. It's mrcy.com/rappid and Rappid is actually spelled with two Ps, so it's R-A-P-P-I-D. If you see that word, you can see that it actually has the word app in it like the app store. We did a little bit of play on words because like I mentioned before, we're really trying to introduce that ecosystem, the iPhone for the EW community. And so we introduced that word app into the word rappid. In addition to that though, on the webpage, we have a white paper located there. We have an open FPGA tech brief and even more information so I encourage everybody to go there.
Ralph Guevarez:
Nick, thank you for joining me today. I'm excited to see what's next for your team and the Rappid platform. I wish you best of luck moving forward. Godspeed. And I look forward to having you on the show again soon.
Nick Koranda:
Thank you. It was a real pleasure.
Ralph Guevarez:
This has been another edition of Mercury Now, a podcast series brought to you by Mercury Systems. I am your host Ralph Guevarez signing off.
