General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) announced on Wednesday the opening of a new Mission Emerge Center in Springfield, Va., designed to give customers a hands-on environment to rapidly build, test, and validate technology solutions for intelligence and defense missions.
Speaking to reporters at the facility on Tuesday, GDIT President Amy Gilliland said the approximately 5,200-square-foot space has been years in the making. Gilliland said the new facility was born out of a desire from customers to have proven solutions, not just “PowerPoint ideas.”
“This is meant to draw our partners and our customers here to actually see and touch something,” Gilliland said of the new center.
“Our investment in the Mission Emerge Center reflects our continued commitment to push boundaries and to enable our teams to transform emerging technologies into mission-ready solutions at speed and scale,” she said in a statement.
The new Mission Emerge Center gives partners and customers access to technology solutions such as AI-enabled mission analysis, tactical edge capabilities, AI-accelerated software development, full-spectrum cybersecurity, high-performance computing, and sensor processing capabilities.
The center will also expand GDIT’s DeepSky lab, which mirrors government environments and allows teams around the world to collaborate in real time to develop new capabilities and solutions.
GDIT will use the space to collaborate with large and emerging tech partners, including Amazon Web Services, Google, ServiceNow, Gitlab, and IonQ. Additionally, Gilliland said GDIT has more than 70 partners in its Emerging Technology Program.
During the Tuesday media briefing at the facility, GDIT staff demonstrated some of the innovative and scalable technologies that can help warfighters, operators, and analysts achieve mission outcomes.
The technologies included Motion GEOINT, a product suite that enhances the speed and efficacy of full-motion video analysis by detecting moving targets; GeoInsight, a geospatial application that leverages large language models to analyze large datasets and multiple streams of information for rapid pattern recognition; and 3D visualization capabilities, which deliver real-time mission environments to a user via augmented reality.
GDIT will also co-develop solutions with other General Dynamics business units at the Mission Emerge Center. For example, GDIT partnered with Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. to develop a solution to process overhead imagery from sensors mounted on Gulfstream aircraft for specific intelligence missions, GDIT said in a press release.
GDIT is a business unit of General Dynamics. Over the last 10 years, Gilliland said General Dynamics has spent $12 billion on “modernizing and investing in technology.” This year, alone, GDIT has doubled its investment in technology, she said.
“We are committed, through our investments, to bring the best in technology as quickly as possible forward,” Gilliland told reporters. “So, it’s really an exciting time … and I’m so proud of what this team is doing.”