2020 Tibbetts Award Winner

Sabel Systems

Sabel Systems is an 8(a) designated Economically Disadvantaged Minority Woman-Owned Small Business (EDWOSB) embracing technological innovation. Seeing a void in the market for an agnostic engineering environment, Sabel leveraged SBIR funds to rapidly provide its Digital Engineering Cloud®.

Impact & Achievements

Sabel Systems leveraged Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding to rapidly innovate an environment where customers could interoperate practically any vendors’ tools in any secure cloud.

Recognizing a void in the market for an agnostic engineering environment, Sabel Systems leveraged Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding to rapidly innovate an environment where customers could interoperate practically any vendors’ tools in any secure cloud. The strength of customer response has resulted in significant SBIR Phase III revenue and business growth.

Founded in 2001, Sabel Systems is an 8(a) designated Economically Disadvantaged Minority Woman- Owned Small Business (EDWOSB) that embraces technological innovation. The company’s innovative tool, Digital Engineering Cloud® exemplifies the mission and goals of the SBIR program, using SBIR funding to fill a technical gap. The U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Command had a specific need for a collaborative engineering space where the government and contractor engineers could develop space vehicles – having a single source of truth would allow them to significantly speed up trade off, routing, and approval time. This need and the resulting innovation also yielded unforeseen benefits, including the near elimination of computer hardware and significant software licensing savings.

Sabel Systems saw the need for an extensible cost-effective method to reach and provide tools and methods via model-based systems engineering for the storage of engineering data (Digital Twin) that is capable of being tracked, updated, and interacted with by multiple parties both in the Department of Defense (DoD) and the contractor community. Through these efforts, the company developed an established digital engineering framework that can be deployed in common systems – such as AZURE, AWS, or any DoD Cloud infrastructure – along with secure interfaces between different vendors’ products. This solution created cost control to avoid billing when computing resources were not being used and defined new ways to use products to solve customer needs. These combined innovations built a recipe for virtualized desktops to overcome customer network constraints with the benefit that the Sable System’s Digital Engineering Cloud® Digital Engineering enhances the engineer’s skills and attracts new talent hungry for modern design and management tools.

This SBIR-fueled product has transformed the business, enabling Sabel to secure over $42 million in commitments from DoD, industry, and academia. This growth has provided the company with the business base for SBA 8(a) program graduation. Digital Engineering Cloud® has been documented to provide a 3.5:1 return on investment (ROI) in reduced costs and time associated with engineering projects.

Aileen Isidoro serves as Chief Executive Officer for Sabel Systems and brings valuable experience and vision to the company. To date, Sabel has worked with a variety of clients on large scale, mission critical projects – some of its current clients include IBM, Southwest, New York City, the U.S. Air Force, Transportation Security Administration, Defense Logistics Agency, and the U.S. Marine Corps.