SAIC partners with Defense Unicorns to speed up software delivery

WASHINGTON  — In an effort to speed up software delivery across the Department of Defense, well known defense contractor SAIC partnered with Defense Unicorns, a veteran-owned small business, to provide Defense Unicorns’s Unicorn Delivery Service (UDS) to both warfighters and leaders within the Pentagon. 

Before the partnership was officially announced March 12, the companies were able to establish a UDS connection in a Department of the Air Force classified workload in just two days, a task that usually takes “several months,” Bob Ritchie, senior vice president and chief technology officer at SAIC, told Breaking Defense in a recent interview. 

“What was amazing about it was, not only was the platform up and running, but then the software that they wanted to deploy and operate on top of the platform, was up and running in those same two days,” Ritchie said.

“The partnership’s only like two weeks old, and it’s already good to have that type of success story,” Rob Slaughter, CEO of Defense Unicorns — named after his daughter’s love for the fictional animal — added.  

The Department of the Air Force confirmed with Breaking Defense that the two companies were able to establish the UDS connection in a DAF classified workload. 

UDS is a multi-layered software delivery platform “built from the bottom up” that enables quick and secure software deployment across various environments including in the cloud, on premise or in semi- and fully disconnected environments including air-gapped systems — networks that are entirely isolated from external networks, Slaughter explained. He added that the UDS platform was built with the mindset of being “defense first.” 

Ritchie said SAIC will benefit from UDS by gaining the ability to streamline how the company deploys and maintains applications for warfighters. Meanwhile, this partnership provides Defense Unicorns with the knowledge SAIC has on the intricacies and innerworkings within the defense industrial base such as varying security standards and timeline specifics, Slaughter said. 

“All of the software primes in the defense community obviously have their own internal platforms and systems. They are leveraging their own solutions today, so that’s one of the things that makes it very challenging for us at times especially as a small business,” Slaughter said. 

“So to have them [SAIC] and their backing, to say, ‘No, we just want the best solution for the warfighter’ is a huge statement.” 

The partnership announcement comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo calling for practices such as the Software Acquisition Pathway (SWP) to be put in place to speed up software development and deployment. However, Slaughter and Ritchie said they had been working on this partnership for around six months.

Though Ritchie and Slaughter said this partnership had nothing to do with Hegseth’s dedication to hurrying up software acquisition processes or Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts in cutting down acquisition time and costs, especially in the tech realm, Slaughter emphasized how UDS and Defense Unicorns are closely aligned with DOGE’s mission. 

“Everything with DOGE and this very, very important new emphasis on actually making sure the government is efficient — obviously DOGE didn’t exist when we started UDS — but it is directly in line with our incentives,” Slaughter said. 

He added that with the decades of experience he’s had interacting with prime contractors, he’s seen that it can take up to “a year and five to 10 million” dollars to build a platform. But with UDS his team thought “Let’s take this thing that typically takes people one to two years, and let’s truncate that down” and do it at a price point that makes it “very consumable by the government to make them not only just faster, but more efficient from a spend perspective.” 

 

UPDATED 3/18/2025 at 4:26pm ET to include comment from the Department of the Air Force.