McDonald Bradley to deliver bomb defusing data

McDonald Bradley Inc. won an $11.1 million contract with the Defense Department to build a network to provide information to troops defusing roadside bombs in Iraq.

The first phase of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Horizontal Fusion Portfolio Collateral Space Initiative went live this month with the Army's 18th Airborne Corps in Iraq, officials from the Herndon, Va., company said.

Under the program, technicians on patrol in Iraq can use laptops and a network connection to access information to defuse improvised explosive devices and homemade roadside bombs, McDonald Bradley officials said.

McDonald Bradley has deployed a Web-based, services-oriented architecture that pulls multiple, disparate information repositories together. It lets them be shared and searched and quickly presents the user with requested information.

Under the new contract, McDonald Bradley will add enhanced, high-integrity search capabilities to the system, including searchable images and the ability to search simultaneously growing numbers of separate databases, company officials said.