Defence services
This industry comprises establishments of the Canadian Armed Forces and civilian agencies primarily engaged in providing defence services. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 13
- Under 10 employeesA
- 38%
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 13 Canadian establishments with employees, 38% have fewer than ten — an industry where large establishments carry real weight.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
No US figure is shown. County Business Patterns is coded to the 2017 US edition of NAICS; this code either does not exist there, names a different industry, or is outside the programme's coverage (most of agriculture, rail, postal and public administration are). A figure is attached only where both the code and the title agree.
How businesses here compete
The structural profile of subsector 911, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.
Government is a buyer, not a market to enter. The market is selling to it.
- Who sets the price
- Not applicable.
- The software it runs on
- Government procurement — long cycles, security clearance and incumbent integrators.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 9111 Defence services covers it.
Command-and-control, ISR data-fusion and battle-management software is bought by a handful of defence ministries, mostly through sole-source or prototype vehicles, and the US market has just been written into long-term programmes for two vendors. Palantir is the incumbent: government revenue was $2,402.3M in FY2025 (up 53%), $1.9B of it from US government customers, on $4,475.4M total [A]. Its Maven Smart System began as a $480M five-year IDIQ in May 2024; in May 2025 the Pentagon raised the ceiling by $795M to nearly $1.3B through 2029, with more than 20,000 active users [B]. In August 2025 the Army folded 75 contracts (15 prime, 60 related) into one 10-year Palantir enterprise agreement with a ceiling of up to $10B, removing reseller pass-through fees [B], and a 9 March 2026 Deputy Secretary memo directs that Maven become a formal program of record, with a dedicated budget line and a place in the Future Years Defense Program, targeted before the end of September 2026 [B]. NATO bought a Maven Smart System for Allied Command Operations in March 2025 (NCIA announcement; NCIA returned 403 and was not opened) [C]. The challenger is not a start-up either: Anduril leads the Army's Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) prototype under a $99.6M, 11-month OTA from PEO C3N (18 July 2025) for the 4th Infantry Division, with Palantir, Govini, Striveworks, Microsoft and others on its team [B]; it raised $5B at a $61B valuation in May 2026 and says revenue doubled to $2.2B in 2025 [B]. The other seats are held by primes and by Europe's sovereign champions: L3Harris (Communication Systems $5,673M, plus national command and control inside ISR) [A], Leidos (National Security & Digital $7,611M) [A], Elbit Systems (C4I and Cyber $930.9M of $7,938.6M, up 16% on command-and-control and radio sales in Europe and Israel) [A], and Systematic of Aarhus, whose SitaWare is the British Army's headquarters C2 (1,400 more licences in 2023 for every brigade and division under Programme THEIA) and which earned EUR 299.6M revenue and EUR 107.6M EBIT in 2024/25, founder-owned and debt-free [A for its own figures]. Funded specialists sit in the gaps: Air (formerly Govini: $150M led by Bain Capital at $1.25B, ~$100M ARR, the NGC2 logistics layer) [B], Vannevar Labs ($75M Series B, 2023) [B], Helsing in Germany (EUR 600M at EUR 12B, June 2025) [B], and Second Front Systems, which sells ATO accreditation itself as a service [B]. Entry cost and regulatory drag decide it. A newcomer needs facility and personnel clearances, Impact Level and FedRAMP authorisations (Palantir lists FedRAMP, IL2, IL4, IL5 and IL6 as risk factors to keep, not to win) [A], ITAR/EAR export control on the software, and an Authority to Operate on each network before a user can log in. The buyer side is concentrating rather than fragmenting: the Army's enterprise agreement and Maven's program-of-record status turn the incumbent into the default, and NGC2 is being competed among teams that already include the incumbent. In Canada the buyer is the Department of National Defence; its Palantir purchases have been small and politically contested (a plan to spend $7.4M a year on Palantir software, which DND said it had 'inadvertently omitted' to announce, July 2026) [B]. CANSEC and CADSI are where Canadian suppliers meet DND, but no Canadian C2 software vendor was found with a disclosed programme. How this differs from its neighbours: 9111-govcon-compliance-and-clearance-management-software is the contractor's back office (DCAA accounting, CMMC); 336410-aerospace-defence-and-space-systems is the hardware-and-platform industry record; this record is the mission software a ministry runs on its own networks. 9131 public-safety CAD/911 is the civilian dispatch analogue and shares no vendors except through Microsoft-class platforms.
The product must be right in a way most SaaS need not be: DCAA-compliant timekeeping and indirect-rate accounting are audited, and CMMC Level 2 obliges the vendor itself to be assessed before a defence contractor may run its data. Deltek and Unanet already carry those certifications. The certification, not the software, is the barrier. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
Sold across the wider branch
Command-and-control, ISR data-fusion and battle-management software is bought by a handful of defence ministries, mostly through sole-source or prototype vehicles, and the US market has just been written into long-term programmes for two vendors. Palantir is the incumbent: government revenue was $2,402.3M in FY2025 (up 53%), $1.9B of it from US government customers, on $4,475.4M total [A]. Its Maven Smart System began as a $480M five-year IDIQ in May 2024; in May 2025 the Pentagon raised the ceiling by $795M to nearly $1.3B through 2029, with more than 20,000 active users [B]. In August 2025 the Army folded 75 contracts (15 prime, 60 related) into one 10-year Palantir enterprise agreement with a ceiling of up to $10B, removing reseller pass-through fees [B], and a 9 March 2026 Deputy Secretary memo directs that Maven become a formal program of record, with a dedicated budget line and a place in the Future Years Defense Program, targeted before the end of September 2026 [B]. NATO bought a Maven Smart System for Allied Command Operations in March 2025 (NCIA announcement; NCIA returned 403 and was not opened) [C]. The challenger is not a start-up either: Anduril leads the Army's Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) prototype under a $99.6M, 11-month OTA from PEO C3N (18 July 2025) for the 4th Infantry Division, with Palantir, Govini, Striveworks, Microsoft and others on its team [B]; it raised $5B at a $61B valuation in May 2026 and says revenue doubled to $2.2B in 2025 [B]. The other seats are held by primes and by Europe's sovereign champions: L3Harris (Communication Systems $5,673M, plus national command and control inside ISR) [A], Leidos (National Security & Digital $7,611M) [A], Elbit Systems (C4I and Cyber $930.9M of $7,938.6M, up 16% on command-and-control and radio sales in Europe and Israel) [A], and Systematic of Aarhus, whose SitaWare is the British Army's headquarters C2 (1,400 more licences in 2023 for every brigade and division under Programme THEIA) and which earned EUR 299.6M revenue and EUR 107.6M EBIT in 2024/25, founder-owned and debt-free [A for its own figures]. Funded specialists sit in the gaps: Air (formerly Govini: $150M led by Bain Capital at $1.25B, ~$100M ARR, the NGC2 logistics layer) [B], Vannevar Labs ($75M Series B, 2023) [B], Helsing in Germany (EUR 600M at EUR 12B, June 2025) [B], and Second Front Systems, which sells ATO accreditation itself as a service [B]. Entry cost and regulatory drag decide it. A newcomer needs facility and personnel clearances, Impact Level and FedRAMP authorisations (Palantir lists FedRAMP, IL2, IL4, IL5 and IL6 as risk factors to keep, not to win) [A], ITAR/EAR export control on the software, and an Authority to Operate on each network before a user can log in. The buyer side is concentrating rather than fragmenting: the Army's enterprise agreement and Maven's program-of-record status turn the incumbent into the default, and NGC2 is being competed among teams that already include the incumbent. In Canada the buyer is the Department of National Defence; its Palantir purchases have been small and politically contested (a plan to spend $7.4M a year on Palantir software, which DND said it had 'inadvertently omitted' to announce, July 2026) [B]. CANSEC and CADSI are where Canadian suppliers meet DND, but no Canadian C2 software vendor was found with a disclosed programme. How this differs from its neighbours: 9111-govcon-compliance-and-clearance-management-software is the contractor's back office (DCAA accounting, CMMC); 336410-aerospace-defence-and-space-systems is the hardware-and-platform industry record; this record is the mission software a ministry runs on its own networks. 9131 public-safety CAD/911 is the civilian dispatch analogue and shares no vendors except through Microsoft-class platforms.
The product must be right in a way most SaaS need not be: DCAA-compliant timekeeping and indirect-rate accounting are audited, and CMMC Level 2 obliges the vendor itself to be assessed before a defence contractor may run its data. Deltek and Unanet already carry those certifications. The certification, not the software, is the barrier. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
And what every business buys · 33 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Public administration, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.
Inside this industry
1 row sits directly beneath 91111. Each has a base report of its own.
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 911110 | Defence services | 13 | screened at 9111 |