Friday, November 17. 2006

GEOINT-The Defense Contractors Cometh

The U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), organizers of the GEOINT conference have done a great job of getting exhibitors to the conference that represent the cream of the defense contractor world, in addition to those more commonly associated with the GIS industry. Some notes from my interviews:

Northrop Grumman: John Olesak, VP of Geospatial Intelligence, now leads a staff of 700 systems integrators, up from 500 when we talked last year. Olesak and I share a common acquaintance in both having had the pleasure of working with Bob Frost of the US Army Corp of Engineers and, to me, the oracle of air photo interpretation.

Raytheon: I spoke with Dave Waldrup who is the product manager of a unique application called Expres'Sense, that uses MetaCarta to search for non-structured information in a foreign language and when found provides a translation of the text to English as well as plotting the source on a map.

General Dynamics: GD was touting their involvement with the construction of GeoEye-1 to be launched next spring that carries an earth imaging sensor with .41 meter panchromatic resolution. GD was particularly proud of the fact that they were able to construct the satellite in a timely manner (under 3 years).

Many of the other contractors including Harris, Lockheed Martin and SAIC were presenting visualization and systems integration solutions. However, even the more traditional GIS companies are now more occupied with offering solutions than products:

Intergraph: What's new at Intergraph is that they were able to hire Gen. Jack Pellicci (Ret.) away from Oracle. Pellicci now serves as Sr. VP and GM of the Federal Solutions/Military & Intelligence group of the company's SGI division. This was certainly a coup for Intergraph and now Pellicci joins Peter Batty (CTO) in comprising a very capable senior executive corp to address the next stage of the company's evolution as they approach approval of the acquisition. With GeoMedia as the foundation technology, Intergraph is very focused on their security solutions for government contracts. They are actively pursing border patrol RFPs as well as solutions for command and control. They've secured a contract with the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York City.

Autodesk: Autodesk's Government Solutions group was showing an interesting demonstration of their integrated CAD and visualization suite. The demo is reminiscent of a video game where you can control movement, position, and viewshed as the user "flies through" an urban environment from bird's eye view down to building and room-to-room level. Since training was such a key issue at the conference where young professionals are sought, this demo was a perfect example of an "age-specific" application that perhaps the "video-game generation" can manipulate and perform with expertise. The horsepower behind the demo was that all of the information can be tied to a spatial database...it's not just a video game but the formats can be exported to common video game platforms.

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That's it? That's your GEOINT coverage? What'd you do while you were down there: spend the day at covering the inside the World of Tomorrow at EPCOT?

Joe, there was so much more, man. I think you missed it other than sucking up to contractors and intel bosses who don't even know or care who you are.

I wish I or Glenn would have been there. Glenn would have had each session blogged throughly, interviews afterwords, and pictures to boot.

If you have anything else, post it. Otherwise, take this as feedback to do more next year or don't even go.

#1 GeoMullah (Link) on 2006-11-17 17:42 (Reply)

Thank you for your feedback. I'm not sure who you are and I guess it would be common courtesy to identify yourself. I hope you will keep abreast of our continuous converage in the future as you should have referred to the blog posts that have occurred over the last few day. Please see:
http://www.allpointsblog.com/categories/35-GEOINT-06

Please be upfront in the future with your identification so that our readers may identify the comments and observations of Geomullah. In addition, our coverage in an upcoming newsletter will include articles of unique technology that we discovered on the exhibit floor as well as a report of the interoperability demo.

#1.1 Joe Francica on 2006-11-17 18:05 (Reply)

Mr. GeoMullah,

I don't know how many of these conferences you have been to BUT if you have then you should know that they are jammed packed with so much info, it is impossible to blog it all or even try to do it in real time. Plus there might not have been communications available to blog it live. Even at the ESRI UC this past summer there was no real live blogging. Just reports which was very informative. I like report overviews -- gives me the best information. And Joe, I look forward to the up coming newsletter. I am SURE you will give all the details from the exhibits and the panel discussions. So glad you got to go and report.

#1.2 Beverly Richey on 2006-11-18 09:05 (Reply)

FYI, I'm not familiar with "GeoMullah" and I myself have nothing to do with him/her or do I endorse etc... the comments here in which I was mentioned. What Joe posts about geoint or any event is up to him and I commend him and his staff for sharing any information from events that he attends.

Regards

Glenn Letham
GIsuser.com

#2 glenn (Link) on 2006-11-20 14:11 (Reply)

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In reply to	[ Top level ]#1: GeoMullah on 2006-11-17 17:42   #1.1: Joe Francica on 2006-11-17 18:05   #1.2: Beverly Richey on 2006-11-18 09:05 #2: glenn on 2006-11-20 14:11
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