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.

Public Access to High Resolution Imagery - the NRO take

Dr. Donald Kerr, Director of the National Reconaissance Office (NRO) was asked about the public access of very high resolution imagery in terms of national security interest now that commerical satellite companies are launching sensors that may reveal sensitive information. Kerr said, "To go beyond the current generation of commercial imagery, you have to think about policy concerns. Do we want to make imagery available to everyone that logs on?...We have to work with the commercial imagery providers on what makes business sense, what makes sense for national security and what makes sense for taxpayers." Kerr said that he and NGA Director Murrett are actively discussing this issue. Do we read between the lines and suggest that we may be seeing the NGA and the NRO step in to limit advances in earth imaging sensors?

Another Take on Keynotes at GEOINT

GCN seems to have the only other “live” coverage from GEOINT.

Quote of the day: “The world was becoming borderless”

The keynote speaker at today’s session of GEOINT was Gen. Anthony Zinni (Ret.), the former Commander in Chief, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). Zinni provided "observations", taken from his years of military experience, about the state of information flow and how this was shaping military and business planning. Zinni was stationed in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down and retold the story of how he passed through "checkpoint Charlie" over to the former East Berlin side only to enter a completely different world after having been isolated from the western world for so long. But in the process, he recognized that more than physcal walls were coming down. As a corollary, he fast-forwarded to his experience of his trip down from Washington DC and observing how people were communicating wirelessly with laptops and cell phones, as is so common. Hence, he observed how people were communicating via the ether in ways that have evolved in only the last 20 years. As such he said, "The world was becoming borderless."  As a consequence, he commented on the fact that just as we are able to conduct business anywhere in the world because of technology, terrorists were actively entering our borders with a different intent. The battlefield has radically changed to a borderless realm where the enemy may be closer than we think.

NGA in support of Civilian Agencies of the Federal Government

We have had some discussion on the pages of Directions Magazine regarding how some civilian federal agencies of the U.S. Government are tapping the geospatial resources of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), whose mission is to support intelligence ad military operations. Normally, these agencies might look to the USGS. I asked both the former direnctor, General James Clapper (ret.), and the current director, Vice Admiral Robert Murrett if they believed that the NGA was properly positioned to support the civilian agencies with respect to the stress already placed on the NGA for military/intel missions. Murrett believes they are properly balanced and that the agency is very proud of their work with FEMA and other embedded teams of NGA analysts in other agencies. Clapper believes that certain circumstances regarding funding of USGS operations is creating some impact on the NGA mission. He suggests that it may be wise to transfer some mapping capabilities that had been with the USGS to other agencies, perhaps the NGA. So, the question becomes: Is there a real concern that the USGS is still the lead agency, with the proper skill set, to support civilian mapping needs? Are we correctly focusing the necessary funding to keep the USGS "alive" given the problems besetting the agency’s organizational problems?