Can today’s aerospace and defense (A&D) manufacturers meet the challenges of adopting Model-Based Enterprise approaches (a requirement for some new DoD projects), leveraging AI, while continuing to support legacy products that are over 50 years old? That is the challenge that iBase-t’s customers face every day. We recently sat down with iBase-t’s management team to receive a business update. Spoiler alert: MES is not dead; it is growing and thriving, and so is iBase-t.
Doubling Down on Aerospace and Defense
Over the years, a typical trajectory of MES software vendors has emerged. They start small, tackling a specific manufacturing industry. They make a name for themselves, start to grow in stature and reputation. For some, this leads to acquisition by a much larger company, typically a software vendor in an adjacent market, where every effort is made to modify the industry-specific MES into a more generic offering. This generic offering is ‘good enough’ for some industries, but no longer excellent for any one sector.
iBase-t was tempted to branch out to ‘related’ regulated industries such as medical devices and pharma. However, in the last few years, they have doubled down on their commitment to A&D manufacturing, serving leading A&D manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, GE Aerospace, RTX – Pratt & Whitney and Collins Aerospace among others, with a strong focus on the Model-Based Enterprise (MBE), supplier quality management, and sustainment (MRO – Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul). They have also made changes and additions to their management team. The result has been significant business growth for iBase-t in the aerospace and defense (A&D) industry.
From a product perspective, the cloud-enabled Solumina iSeries has become the company standard, not only with new customers but also with existing customer migrations from the Solumina G-series. Each functional domain in Solumina iSeries—manufacturing execution, MBE, EQMS, SQM, BIS, and AI services—runs as independently scalable services. Customers can deploy Solumina in Customer-managed clusters (on-prem or cloud). This architecture supports high availability (multi-node clusters, health checks, automatic failover), rolling upgrades, and the ability to scale specific services (e.g., BIS or shop-floor execution) independently as transaction volumes grow. Solumina’s Business Integration Services (BIS) provide a standardized integration layer for ERP, PLM, HR, and other enterprise systems. Solumina is designed for deployment in ITAR/EAR-regulated and CUI environments. We discussed the contents of the upcoming Solumina iSeries release, i130.
Model-Based Continuity is the Key
iBase-t has been evangelizing the Model-Based Enterprise (MBE) for nearly a decade, and not only is MBE becoming a reality, but it is also becoming a mandate from their customers’ customer, the US Department of Defense (DoD). MBE involves a high degree of integration and automation across the product lifecycle. The challenge of MBE for A&D is that an infinite number of connections are required to support a digital thread across the supply chain and lifecycle of complex A&D products. It is virtually impossible for a single technology platform to support such a diverse range of applications. In addition, these A&D corporations already have multiple ERP, PLM, and MES environments (see Tech-Clarity’s research report Adopting a Model-Based Enterprise (MBE) Strategy).
In iBase-t’s view, the key is not the adoption of a single platform. The key is Model-Based Continuity, the ability to integrate and share key product data across the supply chain from suppliers to manufacturers to MRO depots, maintaining a digital thread to share critical product, quality, and safety information. At the technical level, Solumina’s MBE capabilities are built around a persistent mapping of PLM objects, 3D models, and manufacturing data. During execution, operators observe synchronized “tri-lighting” between the 3D model, data collection, and instructions, and can identify discrepancies tied back to the correct geometry and characteristics. Those same identifiers flow into MRO and sustainment, maintaining a digital thread from design through production to maintenance. This approach turns the “Model-Based Enterprise” concept into a practical, traceable data spine across PLM, MES, EQMS, and MRO.
iBase-t is working with their corporate customers to define key data elements and schemas to support model-based continuity at the part unique identifier (UID) and Quality Information Framework Persistent Identifier (QPId) level, annotated with semantic Product Manufacturing Identifiers (PMI).
Product Enhancements and Additions
iBase-t is wrapping up the development of the Solumina iSeries release, i130, planned for general availability in spring 2026. The enhancements and new product features were decided based on customers’ requests. A new product targeted for i130 is Material Out Time Tracking (MOTT). This capability had been delivered as part of implementation services for a few customers in the past; however, as manufacturers increasingly move to composite materials, it has become a mandatory requirement. This new product is Web UI-based and tracks layup and cure trigger points, splitting and kit creation, and time calculation of MOTT materials in work orders. iBase-t also made enhancements to include part attributes for MOTT materials, authoring of MOTT materials into process plans, and integrating MOTT processes into work orders.
Also targeted for i130 are enhancements to process planning, quality management, MBE, shop floor execution, and work order management.
Looking Forward
iBase-t continues to invest in key areas of business value, A&D digital innovation, global deployments at scale, and support of A&D manufacturing from design through sustainment. This is enabled by their commitment to open systems and global partnerships. As with virtually all software providers, they are also investing in AI, but specifically from an A&D industry viewpoint, offering ‘air-gapped’ inferencing models that have no external connections, to protect IP and provide a total focus driven by models based on customer and iBase-t expertise. Solumina AI uses a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pattern, where Solumina remains the system of record and AI models operate over vectorized embeddings of controlled content (knowledge center, release notes, SOPs, and customer documents). Customer deployments can run in network-isolated environments with no outbound connections to public LLM services, and all training/fine-tuning uses customer and iBase-t curated data only.
For operational visibility, they have trained an AI engine using their data schema and BI scripts, converting natural language queries into SQL queries to understand their data retrieval methods.
Current AI offerings (delivered, in Beta, or under development) include:
- Digital SME – vectorized embedding of knowledge center, release notes, Solumina expert interviews.
- Solumina Intelligence – API based (security group) data read access (eliminates direct DB access).
- ScanAI – PDF SOPs, manufacturing, and MRO instruction conversion into electronic interactive screens. With no need for code changes, iBase-t claims 85% accuracy in automatically converting SOPs: a 2.5-minute process vs. hours for manual conversion.
- Pulse AI – automated reports for quality, discrepancies, and exec summaries. This will replace Solumina Intelligence as the future of dashboarding and reporting.
Future AI Offerings:
- Solumina Model Mesh
- Agentic Framework for Solumina
- Solumina MCP Server
- Solumina Domain Specific Reasoning Model
Julie Fraser and I thank the entire iBase-t management team that participated in this business update briefing: Naveen Singh Poonian, Scott Baril, Sebastian Grady, Tom Hennessey, Kathryn Hoffman, Sung Kim, and Chris Morris. We have been covering iBase-t for many years. The focus, commitment, and drive of this management team are evident, and their current growth rate and success serve as proof.
