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Driving a Next Generation Business Model in Defense Electronics

MARK ASLETT

PRESIDENT & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

GERALD M HAINES II

EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT & CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER

MERCURY SYSTEMS, INC.

JANUARY 2015

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Driving a Next Generation Business Model in Defense Electronics

This white paper covers the emergence of a business model that we believe addresses

many of the critical budgetary and technology development challenges facing the U.S.

Department of Defense and the defense industrial base. Those challenges include the need

for procurement reform, the more rapid and timely adoption of open systems based archi-

tectures, and the need to be nimble and responsive in the face of continued uncertainty

at home and instability abroad. Mercury Systems has adopted a next generation business

model that we believe addresses these pressing issues, while at the same time leveraging

our 30-year commitment to innovation.

Mercury Systems is modest in size relative to the vast defense industry. But we do see the

model discussed in this paper as more than just “our model” but also as a possible catalyst

for change in an industry we, like all, are proud to be a part of but at the same time may be

evolving too slowly to deliver on rapidly emerging challenges.

Executive SummaryThe defense industrial base is undergoing a major transformation. Domestic political and budget uncertainty, geopolitical instability and evolving global threats have all become constants. The defense budget is under pressure to remain at approxi-mately the $500 billion level, with modest increases moving forward. Defense spending now stands at the lowest percentage of national GDP in modern history. With this as a backdrop, defense spending is in danger of being crowded out by other pressing domestic needs in the United States, with important social programs, an aging population, and the servicing of a growing national debt all front and center.

Both major political parties in Washington, and most informed Americans, would agree that the need to address key global uncertainties and threats must be met regardless of the political climate, budget levels, or competing challenges we may face as a nation. The rise of self proclaimed terrorist “states”, never ending instability in the Middle East and Northern Africa, on-going disruptions in Eastern Europe, and the already underway “Pacific Pivot” are all issues that cannot be ignored, no matter what the climate in Washington, the budget levels, or the popular narrative of the day tell us.

This white paper addresses what is perhaps the central issue facing the defense industrial base today: How do we evolve into what we need to be? A nimble, innovative, affordable, source of open standards based technologies which adheres to the long-standing drive by the Department of Defense to effectively develop and affordably procure technologies and platforms that meet new defense procurement guidelines.

This white paper:• Examines the backdrop and history behind defense procurement reform and why it has had

halting and incomplete success to date

• Outlines the well-defined current acquisition reform directives set out by the DoD

• Provides a thoughtful analysis of these reforms and how they can work but also what could hold them back

• Sets a workable vision where a 50+ year vicious cycle of halting acquisition reform and resistance to open standards technologies can finally be broken

• Defines and describes an innovative business model and how it can be a catalyst for change

• Describes how Mercury is pioneering adoption of this next-generation business model

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Better Buying Power 3.0 - A Chance to Get it RightSo What is BBP 3.0?

There are eight key areas of focus:• Achieve Affordable Programs - BBP 3.0 is the continuation

of a “core” BBP initiative. The new guidelines continue the elements in BBP 1.0 and 2.0 but adds additional elements to drive metrics and compliance.

• Achieve Dominant Capabilities While Controlling Life Cycle Costs - This part of BBP 3.0 strengthens and expands “should cost” as a tool for cost management. It represents a core initiative since the BBP initiative began and expands on the “should cost” practice. There is also a drive to include managing procurement and costs within the Intelligence Community, not just Pentagon based programs.

• Incentivize Productivity in Industry and Government - Another “core” initiative, this part of BBP drives for “a defense industry that is lean, competitive, innovative, and productive.”

• Incentivize Innovation in Industry and Government - This critical element of BBP promotes prototypes and experimentation, allows for the effective and efficient use of “tech refreshes”, drives for the use of Modular Open Systems Architectures (MOSA), and encourages innovation by small busi-nesses. On top of this there is a move to drive better engage-ment among industry participants to set technical requirements while also creating more and better incentives for industry to drive innovation.

• Eliminate Unproductive Processes and Bureaucracy - This is a continuation of efforts that began in the BBP 2.0 initiative and includes the elimination of redundant “oversight” that can often drift into duplication of effort. This key part of BBP also calls for more streamlined procedures, the elimination of unnecessary staff reviews and burdensome documentation, so that program management time can be spent on managing the program, not managing the process.

• Promote Effective Competition - This remains a “core” initiative of BBP and acknowledges that competition is ultimately the best way to control and manage costs. “Competition” is defined in the traditional sense of multiple suppliers vying for the same business. But competition is also defined by an incumbent being incented to always seek better, faster, more affordable ways of doing things.

• Improve Tradecraft in the Acquisition Workforce - This includes the effective use of small businesses where appropriate, the effective use of contracted services, and how to better and more efficiently utilize contract engineering and technical services.

Defense Acquisition Reform - Over 50 Years of FrustrationFrom 1960 to 2009 there were over 27 major studies of defense acquisition. These stud-ies were commissioned by US Presidents, Congress, Secretaries of Defense, government agencies, and even public and private institu-tions and universities. Still more studies have been published by the General Accountability

Office during this period. Most of the studies have arrived at similar conclusions around the need for streamlined procurement, a more responsive and innovative commercial defense industrial base, the need for more affordable, open systems technologies, and shared solu-tions between the armed services. However politics, inertia, and the lack of a strong will for change has led to many defense programs that continue to suffer from program timing slips, cost growth and technical performance shortfalls.

In 2010 there was an inflection point in this seemingly vicious cycle that, combined with a more responsive defense industrial base, changed the game. On June 28, 2010 the DoD issued the first Better Buying Power 1.0 initiative. Follow-on guidelines have since evolved with Better Buying Power 2.0 issued on November 13, 2012 and Better Buying Power 3.0, awaiting formal publication at the time of the print-ing of this white paper.

So what is Better Buying Power? As defined on the DoD website, BBP 3.0 is:

DoD’s Mandate To Do More Without More. “Better Buying Power (BBP) is the implementation of best practices to strengthen the Defense Department’s buying power, improve industry productivity, and provide an af-fordable, value-added military capacity to the Warfighter. Launched in 2010, BBP encompasses a set of fundamental acquisition principles to achieve greater efficiencies through affordability, cost control, elimination of unproductive processes and bureaucracy, and promotion of competition. BBP initiatives also incentivize productivity and innovation in industry and Government and improve tradecraft in the acquisition of services.”

“I’ve been in defense a long time. There have been lots of studies, mandates and directives

around defense procurement reform- but not a lot of results”

“I like the Better Buying Power initiative. I just hope it gets implemented”

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difficulty adapting to a world where they are expected to shoulder more of the responsibility of innovation and with it the accompanying R&D cost and risk. However, commercial companies have confronted these issues for years, and have thrived on the innovations and efficiencies they promote, including “re-insuring” some of these risks through outsourcing and inter-company collaboration.

Firm Fixed Pricing is a model for DoD procurement we strongly endorse. We simply point out that those of us supporting the platforms and missions that are of national and global importance, all need to engage in business practices that can make the Firm Fixed Price model a suc-cess, and the government is in a key position to promote and drive this change. We will talk more later about how we believe a next-genera-tion business model helps address this issue and can, in our view, also help to catalyze and support change.

We need to redefine what we mean by “commercial item”

The entire economy of the United States has been focused on competi-tion and open market principles for over two centuries. The result is some of the most highly effective and efficient technology development in the world. Companies putting their own dollars at risk are forced to manage their technology investments wisely to both profit and win against competition. Those that fail are relegated to history. “Commer-ciality”, whether for purposes of allocating intellectual property rights or for pricing goods and services, should focus on which party bore the investment and technology development risks. This commerciality approach is already used for allocating intellectual property rights in government procurement. Similarly, in the context of procurement and pricing, a commercial item should be defined in terms of which party bore the risk, and cost, of developing and marketing the technology.

Current defense procurement regulations focus on questions like – “Who else bought it? What did they pay? What was it derived from? How close is it to what’s in a catalog?” for determining commerciality. These inquiries are red herrings, not relevant to effective technology investment decisions or cost effective procurement. Under the current system, if the commerciality questions aren’t answered in accordance with the guidelines, DoD requires disclosure of cost and profit data. What they should be asking for is who supplied the invest-ment in R&D by the technology provider? Has the provider invested in open systems and modularity and standardization? How can these technologies be applied across multiple applications, programs and missions? And most importantly, has there been competition to provide a cost-effective solution? This drives innovation around the technology solution as well as potentially driving down the cost of providing it.

Until this reassessment of commerciality is done effectively, the incen-tives for industry to shoulder more of the cost of R&D will be weak, and the Better Buying Power 3.0 initiative is unlikely to get the kind of traction it deserves.

• Improve the Professionalism of the Total Acquisition Workforce - There are two core elements of this key BBP initiative. The first is the on-going drive to raise standards, improve training and qualification requirements, and strengthen technical understanding of the solutions being proposed and developed. The second core element extends well beyond the acquisition workforce itself and into our nation’s long term health in the area of promoting STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education and training. Promoting the participation of young people in STEM-related careers is a long-term goal that will ensure a strong nation for generations to come.

The DoD has taken the good ideas resident in BBP 1.0 and BBP 2.0 and improved upon them. Now let’s take a detailed look at this initiative.

Parsing BBP 3.0. Some prescriptive ideas on how to implement it

Mercury Systems strongly supports the eight key elements of BBP 3.0. But industry skepticism remains around whether and how it can actually be implemented. Here are three suggestions we believe can help make BBP 3.0 a reality.

Firm Fixed Pricing (FFP) is only going to work if the rest of the puzzle gets solved.

FFP contracts shift cost and pricing risk to sellers, driving them to innovate and optimize to remain both competitive and profitable. Alternate pricing models like “cost-plus” or “time and material” have clearly failed to drive the desired progress within DoD procurement. Keep in mind, the 27 studies around acquisition reform that happened between 1960 and 2009 happened with the cost plus model as a back-drop - hardly an approach conducive to driving procurement reform.

Firm fixed pricing also encourages members of the defense industrial base to build technology solutions that are standardized, modular, based on open systems architectures, and leverage reusable technol-ogy elements. This has become a pressing issue in recent years as the DoD, with less R&D money of its own to spend, is now counting on the defense industrial base to shoulder the development cost, design and implementation of innovative solutions in support of critical platforms and missions. But the shift from the legacy “Cost Plus” model to a Firm Fixed Price model has not been smooth. Why? Because the defense industry, accustomed to years of a cost plus environment, has had

“It’s hard to argue with BBP 3.0. But no defense industry player I know of has built their business

model to accommodate it” “I want innovation. Innovation that’s affordable. I don’t see very many players in defense investing

on their own in innovation”

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Modular open systems architectures need to be viewed as a way to drive rapid innovation, shared standards and the development of pre-integrated technology solutions, not simply as a cost reduction methodology. Without this, adoption won’t happen as quickly as the DoD would like. Accordingly, we believe the DoD mandate should treat the development and use of modular, open systems architectures as table stakes ( i.e. a requirement) rather than as an end in itself or a competitive differentiation. This will change the way in which open systems architectures are developed and adopted as competitors strive to differentiate themselves through innovative implementa-tions, applications and user interfaces. The result will be better and more affordable systems and a quicker rate of adoption of new open standards-based technologies on critical platforms, all leading to more successful platform development and ultimate mission success. At the same time, robust competition on the level playing field established by uniform modularity and open architecture requirements will rapidly and effectively drive down costs. Characterizing modular open systems architectures as a commoditization or cost reduction play will inadvertently slow, not speed up, industry participation in the process.

In the next section we will cover a business model approach that, while not perfect, can help address this and other issues.

A Next Generation Business ModelMercury Systems has developed a business model purpose-built to meet the challenges identified in this white paper. We did so not because we have a crystal ball and saw all of this perfectly in advance; but because we had to. To us it is the only model that enables us to get the job done, provide a reasonable return to our investors,

and most importantly drive superlative results to our customers. In our case by “customer” we mean primarily large prime contractors as well as the DoD itself. Were we smart to build our company this way? We think so. But to choose a different model would seem ill fated given the industry we are in and the place within the industry we occupy. Our business model is simple and made up of four key parts:

We are the only commercial defense electronics provider, purpose built to meet both long-standing defense acquisition challenges as well as open systems architecture mandates. The next generation model we have built is well aligned to the pressing defense acquisition reforms being asked for by the DoD. If you look at the key items outlined in BBP 3.0, Mercury is well aligned across the board. We drive our own R&D, something the government has been asking for and now restates in BBP 3.0. Mercury has a 30 year history of innovation, the vast majority of which is derived from our internal R&D investment, another key pillar of the acquisition reform mandate. We are accustomed, as a supplier to the defense primes, to meeting af-fordability requirements, almost exclusively on a Firm Fixed Price basis. With regard to “competition” as discussed in BBP 3.0., as a commercial supplier, it’s “compete or die” so we are no stranger to that element of the mandate. We fully support the long-standing demand for the drive to open systems architectures, called for in BBP 3.0, as well as in 20 years of DoD mandates and directives.

Current procurement practices unintentionally discourage the adoption and dissemination of open systems architectures

Modularized, open systems based architectures are badly needed to support rapid technology development and insertion, along with affordable upgrades of existing platforms. The process behind defense procurement and technology adoption could actually be dramatically shortened if more commercial vendors were encouraged to drive open standards based technologies based on Internal R&D (IRAD) invest-ments. However, by driving for IRAD but not creating a mechanism where truly “at risk” IRAD is rewarded, the current system impedes such development.

In the current procurement system, IRAD investments are often not truly “at risk” because they are validly wrapped into contractor reimbursement rates. Hence the DoD pays for them indirectly. However, this increases the costs of contract bidders with large IRAD expendi-tures, and thus can be a competitive risk. As a result these costs are often minimized by participants who prefer for the government to pay directly for the desired development efforts, with minimal risk to the developer.

True “at risk” IRAD is the way traditional commercial enterprises fund all development work. Businesses must choose their investments care-fully to help ensure that they receive a return on those investments. These investments often get applied to multiple solutions, making modularity and open architectures a powerful model for product development. The commercial enterprise underwrites the IRAD and no one else pays for these efforts, directly or indirectly, if they fail.

DoD directives aimed at driving open systems architectures have been in place for over 20 years. But progress in the development and adoption of open standards solutions within the defense industrial base has been halting at best. We believe this is primarily due to the fact that the industry structure has been skewed, albeit inadvertently, to discourage the investment in true open systems architectures. Part of this centers around the fact that the DoD has positioned open sys-tems architectures purely as a tool to drive down costs and ultimately commoditize the technology. There is clearly some legitimacy to this line of thinking. Lowering costs is a valid and necessary goal.

Yet these objectives are frustrated because the traditional approach often transfers the risk inherent to research and development to the commercial provider of the technology without sharing in the reward. Risk without reward has been a sticking point within the defense in-dustrial base, in our view, for some time. The long-standing call by the DoD for open systems based architectures has clearly been answered more slowly than desired partly because there has been a disconnect between the drive for lower costs and the need for open architectures. Overall, this is a fixable problem, but one that requires a different perspective on the subject of open architectures.

Open architectures can and do help lower costs, but that is not their primary value. The true value of open architectures is to help accelerate the rate of adoption on new and old military platforms of new capabili-ties and technologies. At the same time, open architectures promote cost containment while driving shared, open-systems based innova-tions in the name of advancing and enhancing our ability to defend and protect our nation and our allies.

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At our core we are a high-tech company, one that leverages our own R&D on behalf of our customers.

For over thirty years we have “placed bets” on behalf of key customers who work on critical DoD programs. We do this by aligning our engineering and development talent with R&D efforts to build solutions we believe will be useful for solving multiple complex chal-lenges. Often our bets pay off, but sometimes we are wrong. However,

across a portfolio of development efforts we are usually right. Mercury Systems has historically invested between 15%-20% of its revenue on internal R&D, year in and year out. We are not an R&D oriented com-pany that happens to be in defense. We are a company deeply steeped within defense. We use our own R&D money and effort to develop truly unique solutions and provide a level of assistance to our customers that is almost unheard of within defense electronics.

To be clear, we are not just an engineering and “R&D shop”. We’ve built world class manufacturing, integration, tune and test capabilities as well. We have redundant, scalable manufacturing facilities. We call them our Advanced Microelectronics Centers, where we have development, engineering, manufacturing, tune and test professionals working alongside one another. We are keenly aware that world-class engineering and R&D is not truly useful if we can’t build prototypes and then drive the process from prototype straight through full-rate production on behalf of our customers. Our AMC facilities are also where, with engineering and manufacturing profes-sionals working side-by-side, we ensure our solutions are designed for manufacture, so we are not designing exotic solutions that cannot be affordably produced.

So how do our innovations get applied? One way is in the moderniza-tion of long-standing platforms, some of which have been in service for 50 years or more. We have seen multiple examples where our custom-ers can take advantage of our newer solutions across the sensor pro-cessing chain to keep aging platforms from becoming obsolete. Second is in the area of developing solutions for newer threats that demand cutting-edge innovation. As an example, we are well underway invest-ing in solutions in the A2/AD arena (Anti-Access Area Denial). Here we are working on building solutions for Electronic Counter Measures and Electronic Attack. Finally, we continue to build advanced process-ing solutions for on-board exploitation of big data. Today, information needs to be gathered, processed and often interpreted in near real-time

on board the platform. Our investment in on-board server class secure computing and associated packaging, thermal cooling and other tech-nologies allows this to happen. The development of these innovations was done largely independent of customer funded R&D. We did the work because we saw where the needs of the industry were heading and we put our resources where they were needed most. Develop-ment of advanced cooling, high density processing to meet on-board processing needs, ground breaking rugged connector technologies, and more were all done with our own, at-risk, non-customer funded or reimbursed R&D.

Finally, we have capabilities within the secure processing domain. We are viewed as a leader in secure processing solutions that are becoming critical to customers in specific programs. Integrated product security is a space we have occupied for some time. Characteristic of our business model and similar to our work around open systems architectures, we did not wait to be asked. We saw the need evolving, invested on our own to develop solutions, and are now working with a variety customers to deliver solutions that also address modularity and open system architecture demands as well.

We are the only commercial provider we know of that builds solutions across the sensor processing chain.

Mercury Systems, while modest in size given the magnitude of the industry, has a broad and deep set of capabilities and technologies. We provide solutions across the sensor processing chain. We “pre-integrate” solutions for our customers. Pre-integrated solutions are increasingly made up of modular technology building blocks, where the subsystem has a very high Technology Readiness Level. On top of that we have made the subsystems ready for the applications and algorithms that may ride “on top”, by using an array of open application program interfaces. We believe our pre-integrated approach is far more effective, efficient and affordable than many commercial providers who sell piece parts and leave it to the customer to figure out how to stitch all the parts together into a workable solution. Pre-integrated technolo-gies ultimately mean lower integration costs for our customers, quicker time-to-market and a draw-down of risk for the overall platform and program.

Acquire Digitize Process Store Exploit Disseminate/ECM

Sensor Processing Chain

“I’m a decision maker at a big prime. I need commercial suppliers that will invest in IRAD, develop solutions I can afford, deliver them

on time, and let us do what we do best: Build applications and algorithms in support of the

mission, and be the platform integrator our end customers are paying us to be.”

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By building these pre-integrated subsystems, Mercury can reduce cost and time to market dramatically. Compared to traditional “commercial off-the-shelf” models that often take 36 months or more to field a solution, we provide a more effective and affordable model that often delivers a solu-tion in 12 months or less. Our evolution into a provider of solutions across the sensor processing chain has been a thoughtful process, leveraging heritage skills in sensor processing and, where needed, acquiring key capabilities in areas we wanted to strengthen, such as RF and Micro-wave. That said, if you looked at our company closely, you would have a hard time telling which solutions were legacy Mercury and which were acquired. The reason for that is another core skill within our next genera-tion business model: our ability to identify, acquire and then integrate businesses to continuously strengthen our portfolio of solutions.

We design, engineer and manufacture our solutions exclusively in the USA, an important criterion in defense and also made even more urgent given that more and more technology companies are designing and building solu-tions in countries that, while perhaps considered friendly, are not conducive to ensuring the provenance or integrity of the technology or supply chain.

We focus on Open Systems Architectures and standards

On the subject of modular open systems architectures, Mercury Systems pioneered the development of open systems architectures with OpenVPX, an open standard driven by Mercury and formally ratified by ANSI in June 2010. Since then this standard has been widely adopted within defense electronics and embedded computing. In October 2014, Mercury Systems announced the creation of a new open systems architecture for the RF and microwave realm, to support emerging Electronic Warfare applications. This initiative, called OpenRFM, has already gotten the industry’s attention. A well-respected industry publication, Military Embedded Systems, says of the initiative-

“They’re doing it again. Officials at Mercury Systems…. fed up with the lack of interoperability standards in the RF world, have decided to create one all by themselves. They have launched an initiative called OpenRFM that will create standard interfaces for RF boxes so that they can essentially be interoperable regardless of who built them. The move is bold and resembles their efforts to forge interoperability with OpenVPX.”

The drive for modular open systems architectures is one we wholly sup-port. We believe we have done as much in this area, if not more than, most participants within defense. We continue to support the DoD directives and mandates, and have in fact helped lead in this area as noted above.

Conclusion - We believe our Next Generation Business Model can provide a catalyst for change

• The domestic uncertainty and foreign geopolitical instability is now a constant we need to deal with

• DoD has rightly, and thoughtfully, asked for defense acquisition reform, including a renewed call for innova-tion and the continued adoption of open systems archi-tectures

• We believe a next generation business model is a good model for Mercury Systems, and also a good template to help foster a better approach within defense

• Mercury Systems has adopted, partly out of necessity - partly out of smart planning, a business model purpose built to meet the needs of today’s defense industrial base

• Innovation is at the heart of our business model and should be a core tenet of all industry participants

• In spite of the challenges we are all familiar with, we believe there is cause for optimism that the needed reforms will gain traction

“At the Pentagon we’re at a crossroads. We’re running out of time to discuss both acquisition

reform and open standards based technologies. We need results soon if we’re to meet today’s and

tomorrow’s challenges.

Open TMRFM

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Innovation That Matters™

Corporate Headquarters

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We’ve invested in open innovations that matter to deliver full sensor processing, RF and microwave

solutions engineered and made in the USA.

OpenRFM, Mercury Systems and Innovation That Matters are trademarks of Mercury Systems, Inc. Other products mentioned may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Mercury Systems, Inc. believes this information is accurate as of its publication date and is not responsible for any inadvertent errors. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.

Copyright © 2015 Mercury Systems, Inc. 3080.01E-1214-WP-nxtgenbusmod

About the AuthorsMark Aslett is Mercury’s President and Chief Executive Officer and a member of its Board of Directors. He brings in-depth experience that spans the technology industry, across a variety of markets that include telecommunications, data networking, security, defense, and life sciences. Within these areas, Mr. Aslett has held strategic-level positions in or has been responsible for engineering, operations, marketing, business development, portfolio management, and general executive management.Prior to joining Mercury, Mr. Aslett was President and Chief Executive Officer of Enterasys, and held various positions with Marconi Plc and its affiliated companies, including Executive Vice President of Marketing, Vice President of Portfolio Management for Marconi Capital, and President of Marconi Communications - North America. Mr. Aslett has also held positions at GEC Plessey Telecommunications, and other telecommu-nications-related technology firms. He started his career at British Telecommunications Plc as a software engineer.A native of the United Kingdom and a naturalized United States citizen, Mr. Aslett has an extensive background in global business. Mr. Aslett has a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard Business School and a First Honors bachelor’s degree in digital systems engineering.

Gerald M. Haines II is responsible for the company’s financial and treasury functions. He has extensive experience in corporate finance, strategic planning and execution, investor relations, and mergers and acquisitions, and has held senior executive positions in publicly traded companies spanning industries from technology and telecommunica-tions to alternative energy and manufacturing. He also oversees Mercury’s corporate development, legal, security, and various compliance and risk management functions.Mr. Haines joined Mercury in 2010 as Senior Vice President of Corporate Development. Prior to Mercury, he served as Executive Vice President at Verenium Corporation, a publicly traded company engaged in the development and commercialization of biofuels and high-performance specialty enzymes, where he played a key role in various corporate development, corporate finance and joint venturing activities. Previously, Mr. Haines served as Executive Vice President of Strategic Affairs of Enterasys Networks, Inc., a publicly traded network communications company, Senior Vice President of Cabletron Systems, Inc., the predecessor of Enterasys Networks, and Vice President of Applied Extrusion Technologies, a large manufacturer of plastic films and packaging. He began his career at J.P. Morgan.Mr. Haines holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, magna cum laude, from Boston University, and a law degree from Cornell Law School.

About Mercury Systems, Inc.Mercury Systems (NASDAQ:MRCY) is a leading commercial provider of secure process-ing subsystems designed and made in the USA. Optimized for customer and mission success, Mercury’s solutions power a wide variety of critical defense and intelligence programs. Headquartered in Chelmsford, Mass., Mercury is pioneering a next-gener-ation defense electronics business model specifically designed to meet the industry’s current and emerging technology needs. To learn more, visit www.mrcy.com.