iCES Corporation
Open Source Collaboration Solutions for Fluid Government Communications

The mantra “doing more with less” seems to have become the new norm and more relevant to the defense and the government industries. With financial constraints looming in these industries, the task of achieving innovative technology driven infrastructure is daunting. Open source technologies have emerged as a remarkable alternative to the expensive proprietary technologies. Deploying open source technologies through iCES Corporation enabled the defense and government industry to achieve new milestones and adjust its IT roadmap to future goals. iCES Corporation leverages open source solutions to solve complex engineering challenges by offering high end system software and communication engineering solutions.

Having served in research and development for the Department of Defense (DoD), Edward Ghafari, the President and CEO of iCES Corporation, has successfully implemented Model- Based Systems Engineering for Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and DoD IT community. iCES Corporation started in 2009 to offer cost efficient, cutting edge collaboration services and products driven by cloud and mobility to the government organizations. It introduces unique solutions to its customer’s problems by delving into software engineering, building newer protocols, designs and technologies through research and development and collaborations with academic institutions. “We contribute to the open source community and share our knowledge with academia to explore and expand the reach of innovation,” says Ghafari.

As the winner of the 2014 DoD Value Engineering Achievement Award, the Defense Collaboration Services (DCS) is an open source collaboration and communication solution tailored for the defense industry supporting over 3 million DoD users. Beside gaining 80 percent of cost benefits by replacing previous conference and chat services, DoD has also achieved enhanced security and communication capability through DCS. The solution is equipped with functionalities that include VoIP, web-based video, audio conferencing, desktop sharing, chat and record/playback.

DCS enables war fighters to communicate with anyone in the open network or the classified network

“For instance, the advantage for war fighters is that they can communicate and collaborate with anyone in the open network or the classified network,” says Ghafari.

Additionally, Enterprise Collaboration Services (ECS) is another open source-driven web conference solution from iCES Corporation that can support up to ten thousand users simultaneously. While ECS is scalable, secure, and resilient, the solution requires no licensing and it is commercially available. It is available on both desktop and mobile platforms supporting Android, iOS, Windows, and Blackberry. “ECS competes with Cisco WebEx and Microsoft 365 with enhanced capability to run on classified networks,” states Ghafari. iCES Corporations’ collaboration services comprise of 35 components including telephony, VoIP, office online, video conferencing, and infrastructure sharing that can be offered as one solution or separately.

As a defense contractor, iCES Corporation has a host of government and defense organizations as its clients. DCS stood up to the challenges that its customers face regarding uncontrollable cost as well as the lack of transparency in the network and services by delivering greater transparency, customization, and cost benefits. With the deployment of DCS, the customer now has the flexibility to customize the communication platform as they gained access to the software source code.

iCES Corporation looks to add greater innovation in the IT spectrum of the government industry through continuous contribution to the open source communities. An example of which is the company’s effort in enhancing technologies for accessing multimedia over the web with an inventive HTML5 client and WebRTC. Ghafari stresses that any disruptive technology needs to be software-centric and innovations in unified communications are no exception.

With the zeal to build greater collaborative environment for organizations through open source, Ghafari leads a talented team focused on high end software engineering in the information and telecom domain.