Tim Reed is the CEO of Lynx Software Technologies, a leading mission-critical edge software company.
A couple of decades ago, the primary selling points for automobiles were physical attributes like engine size or body design. Electronics were an implementation cost factor in car design. Consequently, car manufacturers defined their specifications and farmed out the design and production of sensors and other control systems to companies like Bosch, Delphi (now Aptiv) and Panasonic.
Today, however, the situation has dramatically changed, with electronics and related features—infotainment systems, advanced safety features and electronic powertrains among them—often considered the top selling points of a vehicle. As a result, car manufacturers now seek to control more of their electronics production, either by bringing it in-house or through close collaboration with suppliers.
A similar dynamic is playing out in the aerospace and defense industry. For years, major contractors were happy to outsource avionics, sensors and other electronic systems to third-party vendors. Much like engine displacement and styling defined previous generations of cars, aerospace companies prioritized airframes, propulsion and weapons payloads over electronics, which were considered ancillary support systems. The tide, however, has turned, and the sensing, computing and communications capabilities made possible by modern electronic systems have become competitive advantages.
Today’s most advanced aerial platforms—whether a commercial airliner, fighter jet, helicopter or unmanned system—compete as much based on their computing and electronic sophistication as traditional performance benchmarks. Yet aerospace giants have been complicit in trapping the industry into proprietary ecosystems that stymie innovation and operational agility in favor of locking customers to one system. Much as automakers brought capability back in-house, aerospace and defense firms must take control of more internal electronics development to avoid the grip of vendor dependency.
The Risks Of Vendor Lock-In
Legacy avionics and weapons platforms shackle contractors to the past, unable to keep pace with technological change. Vendors leverage proprietary APIs and data formats to muscle out competition and lock clients into their ecosystem. The risks are significant:
• Diminished Competitiveness: Outdated proprietary systems prevent the adoption of cutting-edge capabilities, allowing global competitors to surge ahead.
• Costly Upgrades: Deep integration of customized legacy solutions frustrates attempts to upgrade systems, draining budgets on never-ending patchwork fixes.
• Data Imprisonment: Closed proprietary data models and APIs restrict access to siloed data sets, creating barriers to insights from data analytics.
Aerospace and defense firms can escape this vicious cycle of dependency and declining capability by prioritizing open standards, open architectures and open-source components.
Redefining What’s Possible
Taking a step back, I feel the industry needs to look at markets where we see the dream of software flexibility and migration being realized. An example of this is enterprise information technology (IT). The use of enterprise and cloud hypervisors that host standards-based virtual machine (VM) image formats, device I/O, etc., has made it possible to deploy, update, archive and migrate workloads far more effectively. No longer are IT teams forced to deal with OS-level/API-level compatibility issues when deploying application services to their organizations. We see this opportunity for the A&D market segment. Breaking vendor lock means architecting systems and standards that are truly open and easy to bank on.
By shifting focus to open systems, aerospace companies can escape the vicious cycle of vendor dependency and declining capability.
Adopting open data formats like the Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM), Flight Information Exchange Model (FIXM) and the Weather Information Exchange Model (WXXM)—technologies that have been embraced over the past 10 to 15 years—and open APIs such as the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) and Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) for subsystem integrations enables more flexible interconnections across domains.
Promoting cross-platform proficiency across architectures like x86, ARM and RISC-V—and adopting open tools and languages like Python—reinforces system flexibility. Multi-disciplinary engineering teams conversant in these open standards and platforms allow companies to freely incorporate best-of-breed solutions from a diverse vendor ecosystem rather than relying on a single provider’s entire proprietary stack.
Aerospace companies must also bring more electronics and software capabilities in-house to avoid vendor lock-in. They can carefully define and manage their supply chain—potentially leveraging domestic fabrication where possible. Following the model of tech leaders like Apple and Tesla, contractors can determine the optimal breadth of internal development against outsourcing across this complex landscape.
Additionally, ongoing re-evaluation of vendor technologies and rebidding for contracts ensures alignment with the objectives of an open ecosystem. Even seemingly “free” open-source software carries long-term ownership costs for optimization and maintenance. But, by pivoting internal culture toward platform openness, aerospace and defense contractors can escape restrictive vendor chokeholds to chart a course toward interoperability and better sovereignty over their products.
While not every legacy system can feasibly migrate to these newer open standards in the short term, embracing openness as a guiding tenet for all new developments fences off future vendor control. Migrating subsystems onto open standards and open APIs chips away at proprietary chokeholds on data and system-level integration that has emerged from years of outsourcing critical avionics components. Over time, the networking effects of open ecosystems make the transition of additional subsystems more seamless.
Tomorrow’s aerospace leaders will be those who view external vendor technologies through the lens of open integration from the outset. Rather than readily outsourcing responsibility for entire subsystems, they will strategically incorporate open-source components where possible and demand transparent data formats and interfaces. This shift empowers greater control over long-term lifecycle sustainment and integration of cutting-edge capabilities. The future trajectory of aviation requires nothing less.
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