Recently, the U.S. Air Force contracted Northrop Grumman Corporation to provide information interoperability among many of the implementations of the service-oriented architecture IT systems in its air and space command and control domains.

The Air Force Research Laboratory handed out the contract to Northrop, who will immediately begin running tests that hope to demonstrate how distributed SOA-based IT infrastructures can work as virtually integrated C2 systems. Northrop will be surveying a number of fields and standards in order to see how these services can be best managed across the entire enterprise. In addition, Northrop will also begin examining all IT and C2 operational threads across all air and space war-fighting domains.

"This research will enable coordination and synchronization of information and application services to meet the demands of war-fighting missions," said Mike Twyman, vice president of integrated command, control, communications and intelligence systems for Northrop Grumman's Information Systems sector. "By partnering with Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome Research Site, we will jointly recommend and demonstrate novel strategies to manage and orchestrate data flow and content delivery across the realms of air and space command and control."

The Air Force might not be the only armed force looking at SOA IT. Recently, the Navy banned commanders from buying more servers, which suggests that it too could begin implementing SOA IT as an alternative.