Unified Communications Software Platform Licensing

The Army is issuing this Request for Information (RFI)/source sought announcement as a means of conducting market research to identify sources which have commercial software solutions that meet the requirements described below without delaying the Army’s current deployment plans in Q3/4FY26. This market research is for identifying mature commercial software solutions and software support services including maintenance, feature improvements / enhancements, integration, testing and other technical services. This market research is for potentially procuring annual software licenses of the identified mature commercial software solutions.The Government will evaluate market information to ascertain the potential market capacity/capabilities and develop a procurement strategy for this capability.

This market research does not include hardware or vendors to develop a new software solution.

This RFI is for a unified communications software platform that provides an interoperable capability within the US Army’s tactical voice architecture in order to bridge legacy and modern systems into a single integrated voice environment which includes Combat Net Radios, telephony, IP devices, MANET networks, mobile devices, tablets, and legacy hardware radio platforms.  The Army seeks to streamline communication across multiple channels, including voice, video, chat, and collaboration tools. The software must provide team messaging, file sharing, video conferencing, and virtual meeting rooms, ensuring that teams can collaborate in real time. The software must provide advanced analytics and reporting, allowing users to track communication patterns, improve engagement, and optimize workflows; and must include end-to-end encryption.

The Government’s requirements are for software that can provide the following capabilities:

1. Ability to ingest multicast streams from radio integration network devices.
2. Software must be system agnostic and can be loaded on any system within the Army’s tactical systems portfolio.
3. Must be able to operate in our current infrastructure that is reliant on multicast capabilities.
4. Ability to interoperate with current Voice Over IP (VoIP) controllers and are agnostic to those controllers.
5. Ability to support talk groups and conference groups between VoIP clients and individual radio.
6. Ability to facilitate bidirectional, real-time voice communication between radio systems and the VoIP infrastructure.
7. Provide scalability between small tactical teams to large-scale deployments (e.g. Company to Corps).
8. Ability to have multiple channels that can be used to join or separate talk groups based on mission requirements.
9. Enables the patching of different talk groups to each other, including VoIP clients.
10. Clients that can be used by a standard user on general purpose user laptops.
11. Ability to integrate with mobile devices in order to leverage talk groups and radio nets through a wireless and cellular infrastructure.
12. Licenses that do not require to call to centralized service in order to function and must have the ability to be loaded in a closed environment.
13. Standard server with the ability to conduct recording service and the capability to conduct near real-time language translation between connect clients and provide operation call logs.
14. A serverless client capable of performing voice multicast or unicast voice communication without connectivity to a server.

Software Requirements. The vendor’s commercial software solution must:

1. Must consist of modular, light weight, cloud-native microservices
2. Must be deployable in a third-party Kubernetes-based container environment
3. Must be hardware & product agnostic.
4. Must be operationally ready to deploy.
5. Must support seamless Dynamic Talk Channels.
6. Must support robust push-to-talk communication systems designed for seamless interoperability and mission-critical operations.
7. Must be tailorable to each unit based on their operational demands.
8. Must support TAK Integration.
9. Must support the ability to specify access control rules.
10. Must support the ability to provide visibility and auditing.
11. Must support the ability to interoperate with Mission Partners.
12. Must support all army Corps, Divisions and their subordinate units; deployments ranging from tactical edge communications to full server-based environments.
13. Support voice-over-IP (VoIP) for reliable communication across various networks, including LTE, 5G, satellite, Wi-Fi, and telephony.
14. The ability to transcribe radio communications to text, and log for integration into the various Data Layers.
15. The ability to provide language translation Services both in the Cloud and on-premise.

The end state is a unified communications software platform that provides streamlined communication across multiple channels, including voice, video, chat, and collaboration tools. This is to enhance productivity and collaboration, while also allowing the ability to integrate seamlessly with existing enterprise applications, allowing for seamless communication regardless of location or device.

If your organization has a mature software solution to meet this requirement, please provide the following information via email to the POC’s identified the bottom of this posting:

1. Entity name, UEI, address, email address, website address, telephone number, and size and type of ownership for the organization.
2. Tailored software capability statements addressing whether the software solution meets each of the software requirements listed above, with the appropriate documentation.
3. How your company will seamlessly provide and install a software solution.
4. Have you ever provided your software addressing the above requirements to the Department of Defense? If so, to whom, when, and scope of effort.
   1. The Army intends to procure direct from OEM. If you provide this capability only through a reseller, provide a statement of why this is a value added to the Government.

*DISCLAIMER*  

This Request for Information (RFI)/source sought announcement is issued for planning purposes only and does not constitute an Invitation for Bid, Request for Quotation, Request for Proposal, or a commitment by the Government to procure any goods or services described herein. Responses to this announcement are for informational purposes only and will not result in any reimbursement of costs incurred by respondents. This source sought announcement does not authorize negotiations, obligate the Government to award a contract, or imply funding availability. No funds have been authorized, appropriated, or allocated in connection with this source sought announcement.