Recognizing Ita International

Floor Speech

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Mr. WITTMAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to acknowledge the contributions of ITA International LLC of Newport News, Virginia to the nation through their transition of Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) developed technology to government and commercial use.

Their approach is unique in that, first, they use commercial off the shelf products for the front- and back-end of the tool with the SBIR- developed analytic algorithms ``in the middle''. This approach significantly reduces the cost required to deliver solutions by leveraging existing government software licenses integrated with SBIR- developed algorithms. Secondly, rather than providing a piece of software, they marry their data analytic algorithms with subject matter experts with profound understanding to provide unsurpassed service, that ITA refers to as ``technology enabled professional services,'' to their customers. Finally, they have a structured process for applying these algorithms, a proprietary approach based on agile development that ensures continuous interaction with the customer and iterative improvement of the tools and services they provide.

ITA provides a shining example of the exact intent of the SBIR program. ITA leveraged federally funded research in Phase I and Phase II to develop data analytic algorithms and then applied those algorithms to solve government and industry problems in Phase III through innovative services. While their focus has been on the Department of Defense, customers across the federal government and in industry are seeing the benefit of the technology enabled professional services they provide,

One example is how ITA has perfected and extended a SBIR tool (LOGCOP) using SBIR Phase III contracts over the years to provide advanced data analytic and artificial intelligence techniques or decision support tools. ITA continues to develop one of the resulting tools, called the Availability Management System (AMS), for the Navy's Mid-Atlantic Regional Maintenance Center to better plan and execute surface ship maintenance periods. This tool has allowed the Navy to avoid hundreds of additional ship maintenance delay-days, improving readiness and diverting hundreds of millions of dollars to other critical purposes for a government investment a small fraction of that. AMS is being evaluated for broader use and integration into existing Navy decision support tools.

On behalf of the 1st district of Virginia, I thank ITA for its service to our Nation, and I look forward to hearing about their future accomplishments.

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