Recab er et af flere firmaer inden for industrigruppen Total Defence Group (TDG), som er lokaliseret i Innlandet kommune, Norway.
Engelsk: Offisersbladet visited the Managing Director of Recab Norway Bjørn Espen Aase in their modern facilities just outside Hamar.
Education from the Armed Forces
It is not a coincidence that Bjørn Espen Aase has worked in the technology industry and started his own business. It all began with him attending the Army’s Officer School in 1985, followed by a year working as a sergeant in the Army’s communication unit in Troms. The following years consisted of four years of studies, which included getting an engineering degree in electronics in addition to studying one year of business administration. He went on to work with computer systems in the furniture and sawmill industry before spending 14 years in various roles within sales and leadership at Data Respons. In 2008, Aase quit his job and bought Recab AB along with four other industry professionals (two Swedes and two Danes). Recab only had Stockholm offices at the time and was restructured after the acquisition. Quality systems were quickly implemented along with an expansion to both Denmark and Norway. Bjørn Espen Aase was given the responsibility of growing the business in Norway.
Good development and continuous growth
Bjørn Espen Aase explains that they initially sold mainly commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products to customers in both the civil and defense industries. These products were typically CPU cards for modular, backplane-based computers. Their small team got support from core partner resources in addition to utilizing internal expertise. In 2009, they secured their first system contract with Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace (KDA) based on the premise of gaining an ISO 9001 certification within 12 months, which they successfully managed. Recab later signed a purchasing agreement with KDA in 2011, which is still active today.
In 2022 Recab has offices and/or production-facilities located in Hamar, Eggemoen, Stockholm, Kista, Gothenburg, Linköping, Copenhagen, and Rochester (UK). Recab has customers such as Kongsberg, the Norwegian Army, Saab, Flir, Scania, Patria, and 3D Radar.
The importance of their skilled employees
Aase puts great emphasis on the importance of their skilled employees. He further states, “We have a highly qualified cross-functional team that operate across borders to fully utilize our resources and IP. The Norwegian Armed Forces and Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) are clear in their intentions to speed up utilization of civil technology development, in which SMBs are of great importance. Recab excels at these challenges; an example is our development of the same datacenter-technology that is employed by Google and Amazon, with customizations to the hardware to comply with military-grade requirements. Furthermore, FSI (Norwegian Defence and Security Industries Directory) does a great job in connecting the industry with the Armed Forces.”
Recab-solutions in a lot of defense-products
Recab delivers products and systems to both the defense and civil industries. This spans from industrial communications/automation and sensors to components in advanced computer systems and servers, including cyber security systems. Aase explains that Recab also offers both service agreements and advisory and consulting services. He elaborates, “This is primarily “Application-Ready” and MIL-qualified system-solutions to the large defense-integrators.”
Customers such as – KDA, Saab Defence in Sweden, Therma, Patria
Recab has KDA as their largest customer in Norway, but Aase adds that they also have delivered directly to the Armed Forces/FMA as part of public procurement processes. Other Recab solutions can be found in ULA-class submarines, Nansen-class frigates, P-3 Orion surveillance planes, TEMPEST approved vehicle computers for KDAs C41S-solution in Leopard 2 based support-vehicles, K9 Thunder artillery-vehicle, as well as armored engineer- and support vehicles. Furthermore, Recab has developed and delivered hardware and firmware to FMA in a “Cyber Security appliance”-system, where Thales has developed the application and is the product owner. Recab has also developed numerous OEM solutions for customers (e.g., Saab Defence in Sweden, Therma in Denmark, and Patria in Finland). Recab’s sister company in the UK has customers such as Babcock and BAE Systems.
The visit ended with lunch together with the employees – a group of positive and friendly people with great confidence in the future of Recab. Offisersbladet wishes them all the best!
