MCL Technologies to Provide Mobile Computing and Communications Software for US Army's AIT-III Contract

MCL Technologies has been selected to provide software for secure, reliable wireless data communication and mobile computer application development for the U.S. Armys AIT-III contract. The $238 million, five-year contract, awarded to prime contractor Intermec Technologies Corp. in June 2004 by the Armys Product Manager, Joint-Automatic Identification Technology (PM J-AIT) office, provides advanced mobile computing and automatic identification systems for all branches of the U.S. Dept. of Defense. Intermec teamed with MCL and other leading vendors to win the contract. This is the second consecutive time MCL has been included in the five-year AIT contract.

Its difficult enough to deploy thousands of tons of supplies to help the military fight and win, not to mention the demanding operational logistics requirements involved in accurately tracking and managing supplies, munitions, spare parts and meals to the U.S. Military forces, said Jean-Franois Jacques, managing director, MCL Technologies. MCL is an intricate part of the militarys worldwide infrastructure to support transportation, maintenance, inventory and replenishment of equipment, gear, food and munitions. These systems must operate in a real-time and efficient manner to support the fighting men and women wherever they may be stationed.
MCL software will be used on Intermec mobile and wireless computers to collect and communicate information in a variety of logistics and deployment operations. Application development software from MCL allows users to quickly build and test secure, robust mission-critical applications for a variety of rugged mobile and wireless computers and integrate them with legacy systems. The Simulator function is an especially valuable feature that will allow the Army to thoroughly test applications before they are loaded onto mobile computers.

In the field, MCL software ensures reliable end-to-end wireless communications by error-checking data and verifying that complete transmissions are received. If the connection is broken during transmission, all data is securely preserved until it can be transmitted successfully. The system provides bi-directional acknowledgements so users can have complete confidence that transmissions were received.
The military environment represents the ultimate challenge for mission-critical mobile computing, communications and data collection systems, said Intermec Director George Moss. MCL understands how to provide proven, reliable solutions in this environment, and we are pleased to include MCL software with our computers to meet the militarys most demanding logistics challenges.