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So, it's nice to see some high-value IT work going on in Canberra after all, rather than just high-speed departmental electronic paper shuffling, and especially up in the extremely high-value defence market.
Located in Canberra's business and industrial suburb of Fyshwick, ATI is an 'Australian company that provides specialised services to the Australian Defence Forces including systems engineering and integration, information technology, verification and validation systems and deployable tactical command centres.'
The announcement was made to the ASX and announced at Austal's website, with Austal CEO Andrew Bellamy stating that: 'ATI has developed a very successful business in providing state-of-the-art systems engineering and associated technologies to the Australian Defence Forces.
'These technologies are an ideal complement to Austal's existing design and production capability in the defence sector and will allow Austal to expand the range of services and products that it can deliver to defence customers worldwide'.
In financial year 2010, Austal reports ATI's turnover totalled AUD $6.1 million, with the merger of the two companies clearly designed to add up to more than the sum of their parts.
While things like 'deployable tactical command centres' don't sound like they'll be arriving to the consumer or even business markets anytime soon, they do sound pretty cool and sound like they'd make for an awesome add-on virtual reality set to some massive RTS online wargame.
However war is hell and a very tough business, and most of us today are very lucky that we aren't stuck in battle on the front lines, even as Australian and other troops are fighting in places like Afghanistan right now.
So'¦ Canberra makes the news in a slightly different IT way to the norm, as Austal gets new defence capabilities which hopefully help make Australia a safer nation!
