Connecting a Defense Prime's Experts With Small Business Innovators
The right engineer, talking to the right small company, every solicitation round.
Good Technology, No Introduction
The federal SBIR and STTR programs fund small businesses to do research the government needs. Agencies publish solicitation topics in rounds, small companies propose against them, and the strongest proposals often pair a small business with a large contractor that can carry the technology into a real program. Everyone benefits when that pairing happens. The hard part is making it happen in time.
Inside one of the largest defense contractors in the world, the people who can judge a small company's technology are subject matter experts spread across divisions and sites. Outside it are thousands of small businesses, each with a narrow specialty and no way of knowing which engineer would care. Every solicitation round reopens the same question on a deadline: for this topic, who inside should be talking to whom outside? Answered by email and memory, that question gets answered slowly, and good matches are missed.
Lockheed Martin was our first client, and this was the problem it brought us.
A Public Portal for a Private Matching Problem
We designed and built a public-facing web application that gives Lockheed Martin's subject matter experts a way of connecting and collaborating with small businesses on SBIR and STTR proposals. It is simple to describe, which was the point. The value was never in clever software. It was in replacing an informal process with one that everyone could see and rely on, round after round.
Each Round
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Topics go in
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At the start of each round, the program's coordinators load the new solicitation topics, with the identifying details an engineer needs to recognize work that is relevant to them.
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Both sides raise a hand
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Subject matter experts and small businesses each sign in and mark the topics they care about. Neither side needs to know the other exists yet.
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The portal reports the overlap
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Where interest lines up, the application tells the program's points of contact, who make the introduction. People stay in the loop for the decision that needs judgment. The software does the part that does not.
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The teams collaborate
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The expert and the small business work together on a proposal, with the portal as the record of who is pursuing what.
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Results come back
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Outcomes are recorded against the round, and the application produces the program's metrics reports automatically, so the next round starts with evidence of what worked.
Built to Keep Working
The clearest sign that software is useful is that its owner keeps investing in it. This engagement ran across several phases over a number of years, and each phase came from the people using the portal asking for more. Reporting was added for the coordinators. Metrics moved from a manual exercise to something the system produced on its own. Loading topics, which had been tedious hand entry every round, was reworked so large batches could be brought in at once. Rounds were tagged by year and archived automatically so the current round was never buried under old ones.
The platform changed underneath as well. We moved the application to containers running on Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform, serving multiple tenants, with a high-availability database, daily backups, and staging and development environments provisioned directly from source control branches. It was, as far as we know, the first cloud native software deployed for Lockheed Martin. For a company whose default is caution, that was a meaningful decision, and it was earned by years of the system simply working.
Why It Still Shapes How We Work
UDX was founded by Marines, and a defense prime as a first client sets habits early. You learn to document what you did and why. You learn that an environment is either reproducible or it is a liability, and that "it should be fine" is not a release criterion. Those habits are why our work today leans toward regulated industries, and why compliance evidence is built into the delivery platform we run for clients instead of assembled afterward.
It also matters that this project sat at the meeting point of large contractors and small businesses, because we are now on the other side of that table. UDX is a certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business. We know what it is like to be the small company with the right capability and no introduction, and we know what a prime needs to see before it says yes.
When a Custom Portal Is the Right Answer, and When It Is Not
Most matching and intake problems do not need custom software. If your process fits a form, a shared inbox and a spreadsheet, keep it there. If a commercial partner-management or CRM product covers eighty percent of what you need, buy it and adapt your process to the other twenty. Building is slower, and you own what you build for as long as it lives.
Custom earns its cost when the process is specific to how your organization works, when it runs on a recurring cycle where small inefficiencies compound, and when the people on either side of it cannot be expected to adopt your internal tools. A program with outside participants, a fixed calendar and a need to report on itself meets all three. So do many supplier, grant and partner programs in regulated industries.
Array
The work items behind this story, and where it led.
The project record: connecting small businesses with enterprise subject matter experts.
Publishing SBIR and STTR Solicitations
The project record for the cloud native web application.
From a first client in defense to a DevOps and cloud engineering practice.
What our certification means if your organization has federal contracting requirements.
How we work with defense and government contractors.
SOC 2, FedRAMP, CMMC and the engineering that keeps you certified.
Running a Program That Outgrew Its Spreadsheet?
Tell us who participates, how often it runs and what you have to report. We will tell you whether it needs custom software at all, and what it would take to build it properly.