The contract, which establishes a six-year period of performance with an estimated value of $95 million, was signed on behalf of Brig.Gen. (ret) Michel Billard, programme manager of the NATO ALTBMD Programme Office and Beverly Seay, SAIC senior vice president and general manager of the Analysis, Simulation, Systems Engineering and Training Business Unit.

"We are honoured that this programme was chosen to be showcased at the 2006 NATO Summit in Riga," said Seay. "This international venue provides an appropriate backdrop for the commencement of the NATO ALTBMD systems engineering and integration contract. SAIC and its team members look forward to collaborating with our customer to provide an integrated systems solution for the alliance."

The final work share has still to be agreed but QinetiQ is likely to receive an order worth in the region of pound4m and its major activities are likely to be:

- To support the Systems Architecture and Systems Engineering tasks in producing descriptions of candidate architectures for each of the target architectures;

- Supporting the selection of the target architectures;

- Maintaining the extensive collection of NATO Architecture Framework products describing these architectures;

- And supporting the more detailed system engineering tasks that produce the interface exchange requirements, and the detailed design documents.

The Integration Test Bed will also create large volumes of data; QinetiQ is designing, developing, integrating and managing the capability to store, retrieve and manage this extensive database. In addition, QinetiQ supports the team in various other activities through the programme including extensive configuration management.

The members of SAIC's team are drawn from six NATO nations including France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Team members include: Datamat SpA, Diehl BGT Defence GmbH and Co. KG, European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), Industrieanlagen-Betriebsgesellschaft mbH (IABG), QinetiQ, the Raytheon Company, Thales, ThalesRaytheonSystems, and the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO).France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Related Links
Science Applications International Corporation
QinetiQ
Learn about missile defense at SpaceWar.com