To find out more about the company and its latest products and services, GeoWorld Editor Todd Danielson spoke with Rick Schieffelin, president of information technology, BAE Systems.

GeoWorld: Where do you think the geotechnology industry is right now?

Schieffelin: The point that we find ourselves right now is probably the most exciting time we’ve ever had in this industry, bar none. And I say that because many of the advances that we’ve made in terms of technology, we’ve made in terms of our tradecraft, that we’ve made in our tool sets, that we’ve made in our infrastructures, the capability of them, the robustness of them, the bandwidth in them, and the mission consolidation and integration. Given the maturity of those things, we have a confluence of a number of factors to institutionalize those things that have been innovative at the edges, innovative tactically, innovative here or there--to be able to put that into a community, so to speak, which is quite revolutionary in what its capability is going to be.

Most of the other developments that we’ve had in the industry have been incremental. What you’re going to find, particularly when you get to a data-driven environment as opposed to a product-oriented environment, and everything is digitized, that we’ll solve a couple of the policy issues (and they’re not trivial).

The ability for collaboration is just going to explode. Plus you have open standards today--you didn’t have them before--so the capability of COTS that you’ve got today, you didn’t have that before. And the COTS developments today are being done in such an open fashion that you can actually integrate them, as opposed to having a very inadequate interface between them.

GeoWorld: As the geospatial industry as a whole or particularly for geospatial intelligence?

Schieffelin: I think it’s with geospatial altogether, but particularly for GEOINT. The geospatial part of GEOINT has been recognized and is at a real operative point where it’s really central to all of the ends.

It wasn’t the case when NIMA and JNET first stood up--and that was, what, 1997-1998? We didn’t even have a common telephone. You couldn’t even pick up the telephone and talk to the different parts of the organization. That’s hardly 10 years ago--let alone an e-mail system.

I can remember in the mid-1990s, we had a secretary who answered the phone for probably 60 people, and we had three lines going into that office for 60 people. So the tremendous leaps that we’ve made as a geospatial community, but also particularly as a geospatial intelligence community, have been tremendous.

We [BAE Systems] supported that--the intel side and the mapping side--with a number of things. But there are four principal areas that we have supported over the years. First, on the infrastructure side, we provided large-scale infrastructures, servers, networks, new security domains, large archival data storage and retrieval systems, applications that manage that data.

On the applications side, product libraries as well as a number of classified applications.

On the analytical side, we’ve been providing intelligence analysts, and particularly in the last few years, full-motion video analysts.

And we’ve put together a training class where we are training--initially we did it to train our own full-motion video analysts, and we also are training the military as well as intel analysts to use full-motion video.

And that’s one example where you’ve got a commercial technology that has become so persistent today that we’re taking in millions of images. And then you have to store them, you have to retrieve them, you have to look at them, and that’s all new; and we’re doing it largely with commercial technologies today.

And that’s one of the changes that we have made in our GXP SOCET SET to be able to do the mensuration registration for the video.

So for us, it’s been the infrastructure, from less capable to more capable to more robust to highly advanced to highly specialized. It’s been the applications from smaller scale to more integrated scale to more robust scale. It’s been the capabilities toolsets for the actual analysts themselves, like the GXP SOCET SET--mensuration, imagery science, photogrammetry, and also for the map production, visual data production.

And going forward, it’s not much different. Our central tendency as a business is to be customer focused. Their needs may change over time and may mature over time; they may become more integrated over time. And focusing on that allows us to have a clear view of what we’re doing for the customer. If not--if your world is all about the tool, if your world is all about the technology, you’re going to be led astray. If you can focus on what the end user is actually after, that helps you focus your energies and understand what’s most useful in the long haul.

GeoWorld: Do you try to get that kind of feedback at conferences, or do you want to actually talk to people who are directly using it and find more specific information about what they need?

Schieffelin: Both, because a number of customers will go to conferences, and they tend to be at a senior-enough level to where you’re getting pretty good feedback in terms of what your tools are doing in concert with other tools.

GeoWorld: Can you get specific feedback from conferences, or is it more broad and general?

Schieffelin: Probably both. With the group chief that’s coming through or the branch chief, do they know how to use the tool? Probably some of them would, but you’d probably get more generalized feedback on the concept of integrating capabilities as opposed to integrating how you make your user interface look.

So probably the first thing going forward is to maintain that customer focus, and I would also cite with that we have a unique capability that most of our people work onsite with our customers, so we look every day at what the end user is doing.

So a specific customer focus is our center of gravity, and the second part of that would be to make sure that we continue to be market focused as far as open standards, COTS packages--that total cost of ownership. Make them more interoperable, more COTS, more standards based, more open.

In terms of our toolsets, we are continuing to invest in those toolsets, particularly the GXP toolset and remote sensing and investing in full-motion video. Both in terms of the mensuration tools for that as well as the training capability and analysis.

GeoWorld: What is your video product like? How do people use that?

Schieffelin: We have a version we’re demoing where we have some video that’s unclassified.

In our facility for training, we also have the ability to be classified. We’ll actually get some imagery from NGA that’s classified imagery, so that we can train their people with actual mission operations.

GeoWorld: How long does it take to train people?

Schieffelin: The course that we have, I think it’s about a two-week course. They’re qualified at a certain level for different--

GeoWorld: The users become qualified, or the trainers are qualified?

Schieffelin: Both. Our trainers are certified--it’s not just anybody that does that training. In terms of qualifying, we use standards that would be similar with what they would teach at Fort Hood, and places like that, for their image analysts. And then there are additional courses beyond that for people who want to specialize; it’s somewhere between five to 10 days to get somebody fundamentally operational capable to use that.

GeoWorld: Is it pretty intensive?

Schieffelin: Oh, yes, it is. Taught by highly experienced former image analysts, and the motion video is relatively new technology. We’ve had it a long time, but only until the last several years have we had bandwidth in the user environments that were big enough to handle it.

GeoWorld: Is this something that people are demanding at this point, or is it still optional?

Schieffelin: NGA has hired several hundred analysts in the past year to do full motion, and they’re doing that because there’s a huge demand for it.

GeoWorld: But you can’t automate it just yet.

Schieffelin: Exactly. One thing that we’re working on is automated change detection.

GeoWorld: Is there a pretty big race to be the first to come up with video change detection?

Schieffelin: There are a lot of people working on it. It’ll be one of those technologies where, in its infancy, there will be a lot of non-standard approaches to it. Then, over a period of time, there’ll be a cumulated experience--we’ll discard the variants and resolve on a standard that is good for the whole community. But that is probably several years away before something is mature enough, accepted enough, widely used in the tradecraft of the different places.

Change detection has been one of the great imagery problems for generations, because we take so much of it and we can look at so little of it.

GeoWorld: How much does BAE Systems focus on the geospatial industry?

Schieffelin: Out of our intelligence business, which is just under $1 billion, about $400 million of that is geospatial.

So with our analytical work on top of the technical work for that, we probably do in the vicinity of $450-500 million in terms of specific geospatial work, so it’s a big piece of what we do.