The Elite 5: Meet SMS’ EMS Team

A hidden gem within SMS’s arsenal of engineering support teams is a very small group comprised of five Event Management System (EMS) engineers.  For the past two decades, Tim Blain, Troy Ward, Peter Tang, Graham May and Bill Maron have been supporting some of our largest customers and programs to date. They have established themselves as one of strongest Department of Defense’s EMS support teams by successfully implementing multiple, large scale and global EMS solutions for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the Army.

Recognized as a leader in the Government engineering space, it was no surprise when an industry partner and their stakeholders asked this team to support them with a new program called the Global Management System (GMS). Under the GMS program, DISA is replacing its legacy and outdated EMS solution with a smarter, more intelligent solution, providing DISA’s Global Operations Center (DGOC) the ability to integrate, correlate and enrich networking events occurring on and between their Transport Optical and IP networks – which currently did not exist. Furthermore, the entire solution is to be securely implemented within multiple AWS Gov-cloud enclaves. Our partner simply did not have adequate resources or the knowledge on the GMS program to implement such a complex solution; reaching out to such a well-known SMS entity to advance their EMS solution was a logical choice.

Although the team is actively supporting the Joint Regional Security Stack’s (JRSS) multi-tenant program, they agreed to offer their support the GMS. Since November 2021, the SMS EMS team balanced their efforts and diligently divided their time between the two programs. They successfully installed, integrated and implemented a suite of applications for GMS utilizing IBM’s Watson AIOps and Netcool Operations Insight offerings. In April 2023, the team supplied our partner a fully developed, Government-approved, EMS solution which is actively being used to monitor DGOC’s production backbone and supporting networks today.

SMS has a long-standing history in advanced engineering and it is our pleasure to support this highly visible GMS program. We appreciate the engineering effort and support that our small, and talented, EMS team provides for our customers.