NORFOLK, VA — HAMPTON ROADS

Veteran-owned software engineering for the Navy's home port.

SDVOSB-certified, on-site in Hampton Roads, and built for the realities of Navy maintenance, logistics, and readiness systems. Cleared engineers who have shipped against an ATO, not a slide deck.

Veteran-Owned SDVOSB
001 / 005 Field Conditions

Navy software programs in Hampton Roads keep failing the same way.

Situation

The pattern is familiar in Norfolk. A program awards a large prime, the work gets layered through subs, and the team that actually writes code never sets foot on a pier or talks to a chief. Eighteen months later there is a SharePoint full of CDRLs, a half-built Angular app that does not talk to OMMS-NG, an ATO package stuck in eMASS, and a sustainment bill nobody planned for. Meanwhile the maintenance backlog the system was supposed to fix has gotten worse, and the next recompete starts the cycle over again.

  • Requirements written without sitting with the sailors or shipyard planners who will actually use the system
  • Modernization efforts that lift-and-shift an Oracle Forms app to a VM and call it cloud
  • AI pilots disconnected from CUI boundaries, Flank Speed, and the IL4/IL5 hosting reality
  • ATO packages started in month 14 of an 18-month period of performance
SDVOSB
SBA-verified set-aside eligibility
6-10 wks
First working increment in users' hands
Secret+
Cleared engineers on the delivery bench
002 / 005 Operational Approach

How we engage in Hampton Roads — from prime to subcontract to direct support

  1. STEP-01

    On-base discovery, not slide decks

    We send engineers to Norfolk to sit with the actual users — port ops schedulers, maintenance planners, supply officers. Two weeks of shadowing produces a written problem statement, not a Visio dream.

  2. STEP-02

    Map to NMCI, RMD, and NAVSEA realities

    We baseline against the constraints that actually exist: NMCI accreditation, Risk Management Framework, IL4/IL5 hosting, CDM tooling, and the data flows in NMD, NTCSS, OMMS-NG, and Maximo that your system has to coexist with.

  3. STEP-03

    Build small, ship to a pier

    We deliver in 4-8 week increments against a real ship, squadron, or shop. A working tool used by 20 sailors beats a 200-page CDRL. We write the CDRL too, but it follows the code.

  4. STEP-04

    ATO and sustainment from day one

    Security controls, SBOM, and eMASS artifacts are produced during development, not bolted on at the end. We staff a sustainment cell in Norfolk so the system still works after the contract vehicle changes.

  5. STEP-05

    Transition or stay — your call

    We document for handoff to a government team or an 8(a) partner from the start. If you want us to keep running it, we will. If you want us out in 18 months, the runbooks, IaC, and training are ready.

YAML PATTERN
# voostack/norfolk-engagement.yml
# Profile we use to scope Navy / NATO ACT / shipyard work in Hampton Roads.

engagement:
  location: Norfolk, VA
  set_aside_eligible: [SDVOSB, VOSB, Small Business]
  contract_vehicles_supported:
    - SeaPort-NxG (subcontract)
    - GSA MAS IT (54151S)
    - Navy BPA / task orders
    - OTAs via consortia

clearance_posture:
  staff_with_active_secret: "~60% of delivery bench"
  ts_sci_available: true
  facility_clearance: in_process
  citizenship: US only on cleared work

delivery_model:
  on_site_norfolk: 2-6 engineers
  remote_conus: balance of team
  cadence: 2-week increments, demo on a real platform

typical_systems_touched:
  maintenance:    [OMMS-NG, Maximo, NTCSS, MFOM]
  logistics:      [ONE-Net, NAVSUP feeds, RSupply]
  readiness:      [DRRS-N, NMD, custom dashboards]
  collab:         [Flank Speed (M365 GCC-H), Teams, Jira MA]

security_baseline:
  rmf: NIST 800-53 rev5, moderate or high
  hosting: [Cloud One IL4/IL5, Flank Speed, on-prem NMCI enclave]
  artifacts: [SSP, SAR, POA&M, SBOM, eMASS package]

The intake profile we use when scoping a Navy or NATO ACT engagement out of Norfolk.

003 / 005 Common Questions

Field FAQ.

Are you actually local to Norfolk, or are you flying people in?

Both, honestly. We keep a standing delivery presence in Hampton Roads with engineers who live in Norfolk, Virginia Beach, and Chesapeake, and we rotate additional senior staff in from our broader bench when a program needs surge capacity. For work on Naval Station Norfolk, NSA Hampton Roads, or the shipyards, on-site presence is non-negotiable and we staff accordingly — not a quarterly visit from a partner.

Is VooStack SDVOSB-certified, and what does that mean for set-aside work?

Yes. VooStack is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business verified through the SBA's Veteran Small Business Certification (VetCert) program. That makes us eligible for SDVOSB sole-source and competitive set-asides across DoD, VA, and civilian agencies. We can prime small-dollar task orders directly or subcontract under larger vehicles like SeaPort-NxG, and we count toward small-business and SDVOSB subcontracting goals on your prime's plan.

Do your engineers hold security clearances?

A meaningful portion of our delivery staff hold active Secret clearances, with a smaller number cleared at TS/SCI. We do not pretend every engineer is cleared — most commercial work does not need it. For Navy programs we staff cleared personnel from day one and can sponsor additional clearances through our FSO process when a long-term program justifies it. We will be specific about who is cleared at what level before contract.

What kinds of Navy systems have you actually worked on?

Maintenance and logistics is our center of gravity: planned maintenance workflows that touch OMMS-NG and Maximo, parts and supply integrations against NAVSUP feeds and RSupply, readiness reporting that lands in DRRS-N, and custom dashboards that sit on top of NMD data. We also do a fair amount of modernization work moving legacy ASP.NET and Oracle Forms apps off end-of-life infrastructure onto Cloud One IL4 or Flank Speed-adjacent environments.

Can you help us get through RMF and an ATO?

Yes, and we build for it from sprint one rather than treating accreditation as a phase at the end. We produce SSP content, control narratives, SBOMs, and POA&M entries as artifacts of the development process, and we have engineers who have walked packages through eMASS for Navy and Air Force authorizing officials. We will not promise an ATO date we cannot control, but we will not be the reason it slips.

How do you handle subcontracting under a large prime?

We are comfortable as a sub. On SeaPort-NxG and similar vehicles we typically take a discrete scope — a module, a microservice, a modernization slice — with clear acceptance criteria, our own scrum cadence, and a named technical lead who interfaces with the prime's PM. We bring SDVOSB credit, senior engineers who actually write code, and a willingness to put people on base. We don't do body-shop billing without delivery accountability.

What does AI integration look like for a Navy customer?

Practical, scoped, and inside the boundary. We integrate models — Claude, GPT, or open-weight models hosted in GovCloud or on-prem — into existing workflows like maintenance write-ups, message traffic triage, contract review, and knowledge retrieval from technical manuals. We use retrieval-augmented generation over your own corpus rather than fine-tuning, keep humans in the loop on anything consequential, and document data handling against the relevant IL and CUI requirements before a single prompt runs.

What is a realistic timeline for a first deliverable?

For a scoped modernization or AI integration pilot we target a working, user-tested increment in 6 to 10 weeks from contract award. Full production rollout with ATO typically lands in the 6 to 12 month range depending on the security boundary and how clean the source data is. We will tell you up front if your timeline is unrealistic — we would rather lose the deal than ship a slipping schedule.

Do you work with NATO ACT or coalition partners in Norfolk?

We are set up to support NATO Allied Command Transformation work in Norfolk where the requirement aligns with US small-business participation and applicable export control rules. Coalition environments add complexity around releasability, data sovereignty, and identity federation, and we scope those constraints into the architecture early. If you are running a coalition exercise or experimentation effort out of ACT, we can talk specifics under NDA.

Next step

Have a Navy program that needs engineers who ship? Let's talk.

Talk to a VooStack operator. We respond within one business day.