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Overview
📖 AWS re:Invent 2025 - The Federal Fast Lane: Deploying Mission Technology at Commercial Speed(API101)
In this video, Jared Summers, CTO at LMI, explains how his company bridges commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions with federal security requirements. He presents three key principles: hardening commercial tech within reusable platforms like Specter for IoT tracking, building on FedRAMP and IL5-accredited platforms like Iron Sled to enable 72-hour MVP delivery, and extracting modular components from solutions like Raptor for reusability. Summers highlights Specter's applications in Navy shipyards and Army depots for asset visibility, emphasizing that successful COTS implementation requires co-investment, security compliance, and customization while maintaining speed. This approach enabled LMI's 68% year-over-year growth.
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Main Part
Bridging Commercial Innovation and Federal Security: LMI's Transformation Strategy
Good afternoon. I hope everyone's re:Invent is going as well as ours. I'm very excited to spend the next 19 minutes with all of you.
My name is Jared Summers. I'm the CTO at LMI. For those that don't know LMI, we're a next-generation solutions and products provider to the federal government. Over the next few moments, I'm going to talk to you about what really makes LMI special and what enables us to move incredibly quickly for our customers, blending COTS solutions with the federal security requirements so we're ready on day one for the mission.
The exciting thing is the administration and the change that has been occurring in the federal space over the last 12 to 18 months. There's been a strong demand for COTS solutions. Why? Because the federal government has realized that there's a ton of technology available out in the market that if they could get it securely and in the right format, they could leverage the broader investment outside of the federal space to provide capabilities to their customers and individuals even faster. They want to leverage the innovation and the investment made in the commercial space on the federal side.
When you think about COTS, it's really easy to move fast and to innovate when you don't have a lot of the security requirements that we have on the federal side. For those that operate in the federal market space, there are a ton of acronyms whether it's CMM, FedRAMP, ATO, NIST, and so on. The list goes on. So how do you bridge and merge the speed and the innovation while still delivering securely? That's what we're going to talk about for the next few minutes.
First, a little bit about LMI. LMI has actually been around for 65 years, so we're not a tech-native new company. However, over the last three years, we've changed the focus of our delivery to leverage the business model we're going to talk about here. We've pivoted away from services to solutions and products driven by our IP and the investments that we've made over the last three years of hundreds of millions of dollars to buy companies and integrate them in a secure way, so we show up on day one with mission-ready tech that our customers can use out in the field.
So how do you actually bring and merge the innovation and everything that the customers want with the security requirements that our customers have? I've got three examples that I'm going to walk through here pretty quickly. The first is that a lot of problems and challenges have been solved in the commercial side for decades. When we think about IoT enablement, when we think about tracking inventory, when we think about understanding where our assets are and where things are in transit, across those three use cases we're all thinking of companies that do this incredibly well. This technology is not new. Amazon does this incredibly well in their warehouses.
However, there's still the security side. When you think of federal customers, particularly in the DOD, DHS, and a lot of the other mission units, they don't really want that data exposed everywhere. So what do you do? This morning we announced Specter, which is our commercial solution that actually solves this problem. What we've done is we've acquired the commercial tech and we've hardened it within our reusable platforms that we'll talk about in a moment. We show up on day one with all of the infrastructure, the hardware, the data transport, and the analytics that are all secured by design, ready on day one so we can deploy to our customers immediately and they start to see the value on day one.
The second is adapt and deploy in a creative environment. It's very difficult to show up to a government customer with pure straight COTS. If you don't understand the rules of the game, back to the acronym SOUP that we talked about a few moments ago, and you don't know the baseline that you're building for, it's incredibly hard for your solutions to get into the target environments. What we've done internally through extensive R&D funding is we've built and accredited our own platform that is to FedRAMP and to IL5 standards, so everything that we build internally, all of our solutions, all of our capabilities from day one are built to the security baselines that our customers need.
What that really means is when we align on a solution that we have that our customer needs, when we show up on game day, on day one, the containers and the applications that we bring pass through all of their security checks with a clean bill of health so that we can deploy quickly.
Rapid Development Through Secure Platforms: From Iron Sled to Raptor
We can either bring our own environment that we have accredited or we can deploy in their target environment. Our internal environment is called Iron Sled, and we use that to build all of our internal capabilities.
There was a customer use case that was not being met. We took that information back internally and started to build an application to solve that particular problem. Leveraging all of our secure hardened containers, our pipelines, and our code repositories, we were able to turn an MVP—an actual functioning application containerized—and show it to the customer in 72 hours. We got their feedback because what we all know is customers really don't know what they want until they experience it, until they can actually interact with something real and say either this solves my problem or I actually needed to do this differently.
We could take that 72-hour turn, get that customer feedback, make the improvements and changes, and then show up a week later with an even more robust application. We were able to go from idea to first concept in 72 hours, come back fully incorporating their first round of feedback in weeks, and now that application is live in a customer environment being used for exercises this week, which is incredibly exciting.
The next principle is to extract core components for reusability and repeatability. On the commercial side, they're really good about not recreating the wheel every time. What that really means is when you're building your applications and capabilities, you build with modularity and reusability in mind. A great example for us is a platform called Raptor. Raptor has been in use for over a decade, starting with the Space Force to solve really hard modeling and simulation challenges, but the way it was architected was as a toolkit of different solutions and capabilities that we could put together in a modular way to solve a variety of different customer challenges.
That means it can not only solve very bespoke, incredibly challenging space-based communications network solutions, but it can also be used to optimize for asset availability across a very diverse landscape like Indo-Pacific, for example. It can be used to solve very challenging problems around medical logistics and the like because each of the components themselves are reusable and modular. We can bring the right components to solve the problem, iterate with the customer in near real time, and be able to provide that solution that they can use.
The investments that we've made and the strategy that we've taken has enabled us to take all of the great things that the government wants to leverage from a commercial off-the-shelf perspective and marry that with the requirements that are necessary as part of doing business within the federal government. To be great partners, what they were really looking for is companies that have demonstrated the behaviors of co-investing. When you think about the capabilities that we use in our daily lives, we did not pay for a company to build an application and then wait 18 to 24 months or 3 to 5 years. But unfortunately, historically, that is how software delivery and capability has been in the federal government, and it's just not the right answer.
The right answer is demonstrating the right partnership attributes and co-investing. Show up on day one with capabilities that they can use that are modular and reusable, but at the same time are built to the incredibly important security standards that you need to deploy in the environments given sometimes the risks that are associated with missions in which the technology will be used. That's COTS done right. When you do that right, you build a tremendous amount of trust with your customers. When you show up demonstrating those right behaviors and your tools pass their security scans cleanly, it builds tremendous trust that enables a whole additional conversation on what else can you do and what else can you bring. This approach has worked really well for LMI over the last few years with our customers, allowing us to grow by 68 percent year-over-year.
That's incredible. For a 65-year-old legacy company that's been able to transform itself into a solutions and products company, to experience that type of growth is nothing short of amazing. That's because of the model that we're here talking about today and what we've been able to do.
Success really isn't about skipping customization. When you think about what customers want from COTS, it's the speed and the capability, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have to be customized. I think that gets lost in the conversation. For a lot of our customers and probably a lot of your customers as well, there are some direct dual-use applications when it comes to back-end processes, whether that's HR or processing everything else.
But when you're talking about mission-focused, mission-forward applications, whether that's for CBP, whether that's for the Department of the Army, whether that's for Space Force, whether it's for the Postal Service, the challenges and the scale at which they face does require customization. So I think it's really important for all of us in the narrative and conversation that COTS does not mean there isn't customization to actually solve the use case. What COTS really means, getting back to behaviors, is that we're showing up on day one with secure solutions and we're investing ahead of need to actually solve their problems.
Spector in Action: Delivering End-to-End Asset Visibility for Military Operations
It's really achieved by the balance of innovation and speed, but bringing the investment and the behaviors and the security necessary to deploy. Let me give you more examples. Let's go back to Spector a little bit. That was the first one I talked about, solving in-transit visibility, asset availability, and really solving the problem of where are my things and how many things do I have.
The announcement that we made this morning was around acquiring intellectual property surrounding this. Now the entire tech stack from tags to edge compute to transport all the way through to the edge data cloud, edge to cloud, and enterprise is all integrated in one solution. When you think about COTS, something that we're seeing from our customers that you're probably seeing from yours as well is they're looking for those integrated solutions that they can buy commercially that solve the problem at speed.
The investments that we made and announced this morning that we successfully demonstrated both at a very large use case for the Army and for the Navy enable us to move even faster. Being a good partner, we have invested our own money to de-risk that delivery because now we control the entire stack. Instead of relying on other third-party providers, whether it be for hardware or for transport, now they have one integrated solution that is secure end to end.
That enables us to move with speed and also to come with the commercial business model. Now they can buy as a service. That's something else that you're probably getting from your customers. I see on the commercial side, I can buy as a service. What does that really mean? What we've found they're asking for, and I'd love to validate with all of you, is instead of just buying a thing, they want to buy outcomes and capabilities based upon SLAs.
That's exactly what you're buying when you think about buying commercial tech to support your own development. It's what are the SLAs that I am paying for that you are signing up to deliver that capability. The Navy project gives the Navy an opportunity to increase throughput at all of the naval shipyards. A big part of that is they are incredibly large areas. If you've ever been to a naval shipyard, it's the same use case. I came from oil and gas. If you've ever been on a refinery or a chemical plant, you know the exact same thing. Very disparate, very large, but at the same time it's very complex because as you're breaking down a Navy vessel, there's all these pieces, parts, and components that have to go off for repair, overhaul, or replacement.
But then, where do they go? How do you track them? Some of those pieces and components are incredibly important because they deal with nuclear propulsion. If you lose one of those—and by lose I mean just misplace—that shuts down the entire yard until it's found. You could lose a day or two of productivity from absolutely everyone in the yard looking for that piece, part, or component.
What our solution does is track and provide asset visibility across the entire life cycle from the time it's taken off all the way through the repair, overhaul, and replacement, and then all the way to when it gets back. Now that data plugs in and goes into all of their scheduling and planning. In shipyards and manufacturing, something is often scheduled to be installed, but you don't have the right part, or they scheduled it out of order, so you put a larger component and left two or three things behind it. Now you have to go rip something else out to put it back in.
Not only do you have time savings and efficiency by knowing where everything is so you're not double, triple, or quadruple ordering things, but you also know when it's ready. This enables you to schedule the right crews at the right time to go reinstall the parts in the right order. The entire process is about enabling the Navy to turn ships at the organic shipyards faster, more efficiently, and at a lower cost. That's what Spector is doing for the Navy, and it's been incredibly exciting. If you'd like to know more, we talked about that in the press release at LMIsolutions.com.
We also talked about the Army example, which is solving the problem when you think about Army depots. They are resource constrained and have a ton of assets. Where are those assets, and what condition are they in? What components are on that larger asset? We have parent-child relationships, different capabilities, and tags for different specificity. This enables them for the exact same use case. If you need to go find a transmission for an AMV in a specific configuration, you know exactly where it is instead of driving around 230 acres trying to find the right vehicle at the right time. That drives efficiency.
I really appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit about LMI and who we are. I think the exciting journey that we've been on for the last three years really shows and should give excitement and encouragement that this is possible. You can do this, and we're happy to talk more about what we do and how we do it. We're over at booth 491, which is straight down this hallway to my right, your left, and we'll have people there all week who love talking about the capabilities that we have.
We partner well with others, and we pride ourselves on actually being a good partner. If that's something you're interested in, please stop by and talk to us. Otherwise, thanks for stopping by. I appreciate it and thanks for your time.
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