David J. Barton
Chris Yonclas serves as NetCentric Solutions strategic business unit president at Vistronix, where he oversees the operational and technical activities related to C4ISR.
The 25 year industry veteran joined Vistronix when the company acquired NetCentric Solutions and he held a number of roles at MITRE earlier in his career.
In his conversation with ExecutiveBiz, Yonclas discussed the intricacies of big data analytics, the cyber work Vistronix is doing and his past technology roles.
ExecutiveBiz: Could you describe your role at Vistronix and the impact of your previous role at MITRE?
Chris Yonclas: I am currently the NetCentric Solutions business president and technical adviser to Vistronix’s Corporate President on technologies including big data and cloud analytics.  I spent 13 years at MITRE developing and engaging with Army’s digitization efforts, transforming the battlefield command and control systems into 21st century cloud and analytics architectures, and working on distributed command and control efforts. I was principle engineer at MITRE and helped architect initial systems like the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS), a tactical command and control system for fire support. I’ve been doing this for over 25 years. Until recently, I’ve been leading the Army’s cloud efforts as an architect under Intelligence programs like DCGS-A (Distributed Common Ground System-Army).
ExecutiveBiz: Which areas of big data are you focusing efforts on?
Chris Yonclas: We are applying analytics and correlational intelligence to real-time tactical military environments. We are working on position reporting analytics or trying to find location patterns. One of the big challenges of our tactical networks is spectrum. In a fast moving tactical environment, we cannot move all data required efficiently for big data analytics, so we are also working on algorithms and hybrid approaches and architectures to push analytics closer to the sensor and discern the most important and actionable data for the mission at hand.
ExecutiveBiz: What is the current state of big data within the federal sector and to what direction will it go in the next 20 years?
Chris Yonclas: The collection of data and the requirement to process useful data is expanding exponentially. There are a lot of open source capabilities being developed, but the challenges include determining how to get relevant and actionable intelligence and employing predictive data analytics for mission effectiveness. There is a growing national security market for decision analytics to help users ingest and understand data. There is a lot of architectural approaches allowing us to unify data into a singular data space. The challenges or opportunities in analytics remain the identification of interesting and actionable data, the processing of that data real-time, and getting that data to users for mission success.
ExecutiveBiz: Can you give an overview of the basic growth plan of Vistronix? What are the areas for growth and things currently in the pipeline?
Chris Yonclas: We will continue to focus on opportunities in our areas of expertise and leverage our experience in big data, cyber operations, signal processing and systems engineering. We will build on cloud technologies and push data to edge-like devices that can run on UAS (unmanned aerial systems) or other sensor nodes at the edge. We are positioning ourselves to meet our national security customers’ most complex mission challenges with our big data, cyber and signals processing capabilities.
ExecutiveBiz: What are you most excited about moving forward?
Chris Yonclas: I get excited about solving hard problems and doing things for our national security customers. I see a convergence in big data and cyber operations.  Our big data cloud analytics can help with real-time event coordination, as we are doing big data analytics real-time in cyber space. I don’t see any limits on this technology. We are all excited about doing meaningful mission work, employing our capabilities to provide actionable intelligence to counter terrorism threats, cyber threats or other threats that impact our national security.
