Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor, is establishing a development information system center in the Negev, the latest addition to a growing list of some of the largest American-based companies to set up operations in Israel.
The center will be part of the IDF Intelligence Corp’s technology campus in the Negev.
Israel has agreed to buy several Lockheed F-35 stealth warplanes.
Lockheed Martin VP global solutions Robert Eastman told Globes, “The intention is to establish a local branch of Lockheed Martin in Israel in the field of information systems.”.
“We specialize in carrying out especially difficult migration to computer systems. This requires us to be here, with the customers, every day. We have succeeded several times with this model in previous projects, and we intend to apply this model in Israel too. It includes the opening of offices, bringing in our workers, initially from other countries, hiring local workers, and cooperating with local companies.”
Lockheed Martin’s participation in the Negev center will involve adapting lines of code written decades ago, to modern computer systems. This process will sometimes be straightforward, but in other cases will require the rewriting of code.
Lockheed Martin expects to hire 100 Israeli employees for 1-2 years to set up the data center.
Eastman said that Lockheed Martin is examining other opportunities in the Israeli market, especially in information security.