Thales Technology Summit: "Where we have capability that can be reused, we maximise it for our customers’ benefit"

Why is Thales organising a Technology Summit in the UK?

Mike Sewart: A simple answer is that we have a lot of great technologies in place across Thales in the UK, but they are often perceived as being siloed in how we have deployed them for our customers. This summit is a chance to illustrate the complete portfolio of technical capabilities that Thales has in the UK, that underpin our products and services. By bringing this together holistically, it allows all our customers to understand how these technical capabilities can be extended to serve adjacent products and services, driving reuse and improving pace.

We want to demonstrate that our technology portfolio is genuinely aligned with UK market trends and our customer challenges.  A clear example is the UK Defence Investment Plan, published at the end of June. It sets out a direction from the MOD, with themes like uncrewed systems, air defence and cyber capabilities. We want to show how we are relevant to our UK MOD customer direction.

Second—and this is where I’m slightly more candid—we have needed to refresh how we work. When you’re part of a large organisation, it’s easy to drift into silos across domains. We can sometimes struggle to join things up in the way customers want us to. That’s why we’ve built a technology strategy that’s derived from the Thales Group direction, but shaped for UK customers and scoped around the technical capability that resides in the UK.

The Summit is an opportunity to launch this strategy, so I won’t reveal full details here, but we’re already working with our teams to embed it across our organisation in the UK, whether they’re delivering optronic systems, sonar systems, or cyber security systems.

This dedicated event is also an opportunity to deepen customer intimacy, strengthen our strategic relationship, and showcase Thales' latest innovations and capabilities. 

In short, we’re bringing great technology to the table, but we’re also being honest that we need to improve how we bring it together, to the benefit of our customers and partners.

Thales will be demonstrating a number of technologies at the Summit where an integrated approach is already a key theme. Can you tell us a little about these?

MS: What we’re demonstrating is very much about reusable capability and partnerships—making integration easier for customers, rather than treating each programme like a completely new invention. Where we have capability that can be reused, we maximise it for our customers’ benefit, which improves our time to market, but also improves the pace in which the capability can be in the hands of our users.

Let me give a few examples.

With the Royal Navy, we’ve done excellent work on maritime mine countermeasures. That’s particularly relevant right now given the focus on hybrid naval operations. Our autonomy technology for surface vehicles is a suite of software that enables these vehicles to navigate in open water. We’re also among the first to deploy it in an operational context, and while it’s being used for mine countermeasures, the same technical building block can support any partner platform that needs self-navigation autonomy software. It’s the kind of reusable capability we want to lift from one platform to another, because it brings consistency for customers and gets operational capability into the hands of the warfighter faster.

In sonar, the story is similar. With our Sonar 2087 suite, we’re one of the world’s leaders in anti-submarine warfare. At the Summit, we’ll also show how we’re reusing that knowledge and capability in an uncrewed context, notably by miniaturising the sonar know-how to create Sonar 76 Nano, a configuration suitable for uncrewed platforms.

And in air defence, our multi-domain mission support system—MD MSS—is already in use by the Air Force. What we want people to see at the Summit is how it could be leveraged by other MOD front-line commands and also integrated with the wider Thales SkyView platform to help enable a more complete integrated air and missile defence system for the UK.

But Thales technology goes far beyond defence. At the Summit, our dedicated “Securing our Way of Life” will showcase how our aerospace, cybersecurity and digital identity capabilities help protect the systems, infrastructure and services we rely on every day. That’s where we’ll highlight solutions like Fly-to-Gate, part of our Digital Identity portfolio, which uses facial recognition to streamline and secure passenger journeys at airport travel from check-in through boarding.

The broader point is that there’s a two-way flow between defence and other activities. The more we drive that cross-sector approach, the better. Thales is in a strong position for this, because we’re a high-tech leader. We can reuse technical “building blocks” between complex defence solutions as well as civil solutions.

With 7,000 employees, including 4,500 engineers, across 16 sites throughout the UK, we’re well positioned to do this. We’ve been developing some of the most advanced and innovative technologies for over a century, and we remain committed to staying at the cutting edge. Our 200 experts at our CortAix AI accelerator for example are helping advance mission-critical AI capabilities to meet the UK’s operational needs.

In practical terms, how will you measure the success of the technology strategy in the UK?

MS: For me, success comes down to three things.

Firstly, customer feedback is essential. We celebrate where we’ve done well, but we also take seriously the things we can improve. As we embed this strategy, I’ll be asking customers and partners whether our ecosystem is developing in the right direction. That kind of 360-degree feedback will shape how we progress.

The second key element is our partner ecosystem. We already work with over 700 SMEs, as well as academia and larger partners. But we want to be much more deliberate about building partnerships around local ecosystems at our sites—in Belfast, Wales, England, and Scotland—with local universities, SMEs and partners who can help us develop products and services. The real test is whether these ecosystems grow in a purposeful way and align with the technologies we want to be known for.

Thirdly, how quickly we can bring value. The more we can work with partners, reusing what they have and reusing what we have, the less we waste time “reinventing the wheel”. And I’ll be clear: the defence ecosystem does reinvent the wheel more than it should. I’ve seen that over the last nine years across the sector. It’s not because any single organisation is doing the wrong thing. It’s driven by the complexity of security and, culturally, we’re not designed to share by default.

There’s now a government push to drive interoperability and integration, and I think we all need to be relevant to that. The result we’re aiming for is simple: Thales will be able to deliver products and services faster, and customers should be able to get them to end-users and operators sooner.

These are the tests we will hold ourselves to and how we will measure the success of our strategy. 

Ultimately, it all comes back to our purpose: building a future we can all trust.