The chief executive of CACI International has tasked one of his top executives with putting together a five-year growth strategy that, so far, includes plans to introduce a new product.
Ken Asbury told Inside Defense in an interview this week the company's realignment of its executive team in May was meant to allow John Mengucci, CACI's chief operating officer, to take on an expanded role.
As part of the restructuring, CACI hired former BAE Systems executive DeEtte Gray to serve as president of U.S. operations.
"What I really wanted to do was I wanted to unlock John," Asbury said. "I wanted to get in front of the bow wave of new money."
Asbury said he tasked Mengucci with ensuring CACI's policies "resemble what a big business would do, not a small business."
Additionally, Asbury asked Mengucci to "put an aggressive growth plan in place."
"What I've asked John to do and he has done admirably is put a series of small tiger teams together and look at things where we want to be five years from now and start executing on it," Asbury continued.
So far, as part of this effort, CACI is seeking to apply the technique it used to develop a counter-drone system to build an electronic warfare product, according to Asbury.
The company previously introduced its SkyTracker product, a set of sensors and processing systems that can identify drones in the air or on the ground as well as track down their handsets.
Asbury said CACI is seeking an "elegant" electronic warfare solution.
"We want to have non-attributable jamming, we want to be able to pick the exact frequencies we want jammed . . . and we want to do it to where it is really supremely supportable," Asbury said. "So think of software-defined radios that are exquisitely jamming certain enemy radio frequencies and doing it in such a way that sometimes they don't know that we're doing it."
Asbury said CACI is demonstrating the capability now. "We're going to crawl, walk, run this so we're very focused right now on one customer just to prove it out," he said.
He said CACI is increasing its research and development spending in key areas.
"For a small amount of money here and showing how [a technology] could be adapted to a particular mission space . . . you can turn that into revenue and sales and profit quickly," Asbury said. "We're making educated guesses that there's going to be more money flowing into things that have needed to be modernized for a long time."
Additionally, Asbury said CACI is sharpening its focus on agile software development with a new facility.
"We built an agile software factory out in Ashburn, [VA], and we're running multiple programs through it," Asbury said. "It's an old warehouse that we've outfitted as a series of scrum rooms and projection centers and interfaces."