At first glance, the photo on the wall of the Daronmont lab in Adelaide could be any employee’s holiday snap, the classic sandy beach and calm blue water, shot from a boat offshore. Only engineer Dominic Vorrasi’s suggestion to take a closer look at tubes poking through the surface at middle distance gives it away, revealing two masts of a submerged Collins class submarine, parked still and silent so Daronmont could calibrate its own equipment onboard. In the classic engineer’s tendency to understatement, Vorassi described it as one of the more interesting days on the job.
On the Collins, Daronmont’s Kestrel RF Communications Surveillance and Direction Finding system provides wideband signal search, narrowband audio interception and direction finding (DF) over the HF, VHF and UHF bands. In 2009 the company ran a development program to upgrade the Kestrel after it was informed that support for one of its main components would soon be withdrawn. This development programme was recognised in the 2010 Australian Defence Magazine (ADM) Defence Material Organisation (DMO)/Industry Team of the Year Awards for Excellence, receiving a commendation for outstanding achievement in the Sustainment Category. Over the past three years Kestrel has evolved into CommSECA – and shrunk from a full rack of equipment on Collins to something the size of an early video recorder. CommSECA is ideal for surface ships from frigates to patrol boats.
Kestrel and CommSECA illustrate Daronmont’s niche in the marketplace - designing and integrating new systems, sometimes replacing legacy products from another provider with its own, often as part of a much larger system and in the process occasionally creating a product that can be developed further for other tasks or other markets. And increasingly those markets are maritime rather than the air environment for which Daronmont has been known in the past. Business development and marketing manager Lee Stanley explained that CommSECA is the result of more than a decade of experience in the Communications DF domain.
“There’s 10 years of pedigree there,” he said to ADM. “We started with an opportunity to address some obsolescence issues on our submarine fleet and we’ve taken that opportunity and over time reengineered the entire system in to a Daronmont system. And then we’ve taken that further, invested in our own R&D and built the export capable CommSECA system.
“That’s now being successfully exported to the NZ Navy. There are opportunities in the northern hemisphere for CommSECA which we’re close to closing and we’re looking back in to the Australian navy for opportunities on patrol vessels and potentially even the Anzacs and Border Protection Command vessels.”
Daronmont originally made its name designing, integrating and supporting systems aimed at things that fly rather than float. One of its early successes, the WARDEN system (Wide Area Regional Defence Environment Network) answered a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) need for a correlated picture of multiple air defence threats received through various sensors. The RAAF’s Regional Operations Centres used WARDEN for eight years, with Daronmont providing on-site support and software maintenance and upgrades over the life of the system.
Lessons learned on WARDEN were put to good use from 2004 when prime contractor Boeing Defence Australia subcontracted Daronmont to produce several key software components of the Vigilare integrated ground based air defence command and control system. Daronmont’s involvement included visualisation, database management and a large variety of sensor and agency interfaces, with ongoing support. Vigilare became operational in 2010.
In 2000 Daronmont deployed and proved its own High Frequency Surface Wave Radar system, described by CEO Ben Norris as a “mini-JORN”, in northern Australia. This success led to an operational SECAR system installed for Coastwatch (now Border Protection Command) with comprehensive all-weather 24-hour surveillance services and data in 2005. Much like the CommSECA, it was developed to fulfil a specification, then turned in to a package that could now be sold as a product around the world.
Daronmont has also taken the role of prime integrator, subcontracting BAE Systems, C4i and Sage Automation in refurbishing the RAAF’s 114 Mobile Control & Reporting Unit, after its two year overseas deployment to provide air battle space management in the Kandahar region in Afghanistan. Daronmont updated processing and display systems and redesigned the internal layout of the operations cabins in consultation with RAAF air defence operators, incorporating the lessons learned in Afghanistan. Daronmont is now contracted to support the unit through to 2025.
Involvement in other projects has created products as diverse as Link 11 and Link 16 training systems for combat systems operators and data link managers, and even long-life batteries for special operations use.
But Stanley says the company, which now employs about 55 people, is still all about systems integration and support.
“We really view ourselves as a small systems integrator,” he said. “We do have some products, but the majority of our programs involve integrating other suupliers’ equipment in to systems. Our work today is approximately 70 per cent in the air domain and about 30 per cent and growing in the maritime domain.”
And it doesn’t have to be a headline project. Daronmont employees are to be found assisting projects run by DSTO in the passive radar space, and helping to develop future requirements in the Jindalee Operational Radar Network at Edinburgh. They are also assisting a local private company that had a ground breaking idea, but needed horsepower to develop it in to a product ready for market.
Flexibility in capability and approach is the key – Daronmont regularly helps customers clarify what it is they are actually trying to achieve before discussing what sort of architecture may achieve it. Company engineers are used to designing new systems to work with existing antennas and display systems, or legacy architecture. The company also operates a permanent 24-hour helpdesk for major customers throughout the life of the relationship.
The company enjoys the flexibility provided by independence – privately owned and not aligned to any one major prime contractor, Daronmont has worked with Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Indra and Northrop Grumman, but also wins the majority of its work as prime contractor. CEO Ben Norris believes this independence has provided the flexibility to concentrate on the customer, make decisions quickly and look after employees in a way that ensures many are in to their second decade with the company.
“I think I’m very privileged,” he said. “I have a very free hand. We have no sort of cast in concrete sales targets or profit targets, it’s all about a long term vision, doing the right thing by the customer and building strength on strength. We’ve had our ups and downs but over time we are growing and we’re getting more sophisticated, stronger and more mature as a company. Again it’s all about flexibility and responsiveness - I don’t spend my life writing reports to boards or addressing the stock market.”
That sort of freedom gives Norris a free hand to develop what he believes is the most important element of the company’s success – relationships.
“We live and die by them,” he said. “And one of the many good things about Daronmont is that the relationships we manage are spread throughout the business. For example, our chief engineer Duncan Groom has been with the company since it started and the relationships that he has with our customers and some of our partners continue to bring us work.
“Our more junior engineers and graduates get involved in interfacing directly with the customer. And they understand the importance of building their relationships and their networks within the customer’s organisation. It’s part of our strength as a company that we don’t hold those relationships in one or two people.”
Norris is strong on people, believing any business is only as strong as the knowledge and attitude of its employees. In a field where innovation and precision win contracts, “average” engineers are not enough. And neither is a corporate structure that restricts their freedom to do what they do best.
“You see all the successful SMEs and there are plenty of them, and they have all got excellent engineers working for them and they’ve got very good ownership and corporate structures that give them the freedom that I’ve got,” he said. “So the lessons are that if you’re going to be unreasonably constrained you’re going to find business hard. And if you’ve got average engineers you’ll find the going even tougher.”
He is passionate about the quality of Australian engineering and innovation, and wishes the Defence Materiel Organisation was more willing to invest the time and effort needed for Australian industry to answer major requirements, rather than buying off the shelf from overseas. Norris believes that an organisation more concerned with the overall cost of through-life-support than initial purchase price would see the value in such an approach – and ultimately deliver a better result for the Australian Defence Force and taxpayers.
“DMO oversimplifies this theory that they can buy something overseas and have it supported in Australia,” he said. “But in fact when it comes to midlife upgrades Australian industry can’t do a thing with these foreign built systems unless they can get in to the IP (Intellectual Property), which is virtually impossible. So there’s got to be a balance there of some home grown equipment as well as the foreign purchased stuff.”
Norris is confident in Daronmont’s future and its ability to adapt.
“Even within the limited budgets of SMEs, we’ve shown that we can go through a program to develop a new product like CommSECA, invest in that capability and then win international tenders against world class competition,” he said. “We know we can be very competitive in that space.
“I’m very confident about where we’re going and the people that we’ve got to take us there.”
This article first appeared in Australian Defence Magazine VOL.23 No.3, March 2015