The need for a marketplace
It's really hard to do business in the defense industry. It's expensive, it's time-consuming, and it's difficult to build and maintain the network you need to build your backlog. I believe a secure B2B marketplace is critical to exposing opportunity across the defense industrial base. If this network of opportunities becomes visible, the defense industrial base can flex to technology opportunities more quickly, develop novel architectures with greater agility, and scale more quickly to solve urgent and important problems.
My name is Ryan McLean. I left federal civil service in March 2025 after leading several high profile initiatives in the Department of Defense. My roots are in computer engineering, but I also like to help people create the connections they need to solve problems and deliver better outcomes for their users. With ioTACTICAL, I'm working to create new "neural pathways" between defense businesses that did not previously exist.
When I led the TAK Product Center from 2021 to 2024, I encountered the same problem many times. Defense and public sector companies wanted to know where to find the best partners for TAK plugin development, integration, training, and TAK Server hosting. Even though I knew much of the TAK network, I faced two problems: I couldn't recommend or favor specific companies as a government official, and the TAK ecosystem had grown too large to truly map and comprehend.
The "Arsenal of Democracy" existed because of many new B2B defense industrial base connections. After I departed federal civil service, I set out to solve the problem of "Who does X" in today's technology-driven defense industrial base. When the massive federal government is legally treated as a single customer, it's hard for niche suppliers and specialized technologists to see an opening.
After talking to other innovators, I learned that marketplace visibility is, indeed, a problem we need to solve. The marketplace is where this begins, but ioTACTICAL has an exciting roadmap. Over time, we'll experiment as a community with new features that improve flow through the defense industrial base and reduce the friction and toil in delivering useful capabilities to the Department of Defense.
Thanks for visiting, and I'm excited to help you solve problems!