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.
