This week we’ve been focusing on getting quotes for the on-premises software licenses that we required to do our project work. We’ve already met with one of the vendors and discussed acquiring an extended trial license as well as getting us access to some demos that we can work on. Because of the problems we’ve been facing with obtaining licenses to the ECM software, we’ve been communicating heavily with our liaisons to discuss possible alternatives (open-source software, custom tools, etc.) that we can pursue. If we need to, the sales representative we met with said that it is possible for us to gain access to the software through only the API. This would enable us to perform some rudimentary development on the system without the need to pay the expensive license fees.

If there’s any positive to the challenges we are facing, they’ve given us some valuable experience with contacting and communicating with software companies to get product information and specifications. We’ve also gained a lot of experience with conducting a trade study, since we have been constantly iterating on our original study as we find new ECMs and gain more information from the software providers. We hope to have all these issues resolved by next week, and we are confident that we will find a solution that meets Raytheon’s requirements.