Scipio Networks signs with Thales

Scipio Networks, the young German defence-technology company led by Philipp Enzinger, has agreed a partnership with Thales, one of the largest defence groups in the world. The two announced the tie-up on the 23rd of June, from Berlin and Paris.

Scipio builds a piece of software called Appia: a logistics middleware that gives armed forces a live picture of what they hold, what they have used and what they need, across every echelon, in place of the manual, often paper-based coordination that still governs much military resupply. Under the agreement, Appia will integrate with Thales’s HexaForce, the group’s C4ISR command system, so that operational staff can see real-time resupply data inside the same environment they use to run the battle.

The point of the exercise is to close a gap that has quietly cost armies for as long as they have existed: the distance between what a commander intends and what the supply chain can actually support. “Integrating Appia with HexaForce means that for the first time, European armed forces can operate with a unified picture of their command intent and their logistical reality simultaneously,” said Enzinger. Olivier Kermagoret, Thales’s vice-president for defence, put it from the other side: “HexaForce is built on the conviction that next-generation C4ISR must be connected to every layer of the operational environment, including the logistical one.”

Thales employs some 83,000 people across 68 countries and posted sales of 20.6 billion euros last year. For a company as young as Scipio, a Franco-German alliance with a partner of that size, pitched explicitly at NATO interoperability, is an unusual and serious endorsement. ■