INDUSTRY INTERVIEW: AGI
Q: Briefly describe AGI’s corporate competencies for military space and missile defense missions.
A: STK is the analysis and visualization standard in the military space community, used for critical engineering and operator tasks such as satellite maneuvering and conjunction analysis. Our COTS software can be integrated and can provide a common platform for concept design through operational phases. Our military space competencies include space projection, astrodynamics calculations, ISR mission planning, satellite and aircraft systems design, and communications and radar analysis, to name a few. These capabilities are easily integrated and interoperable across programs. Missile defense professionals use AGI’s competencies for system-level analysis of threats, sensors, communications, intercept engagements and defense architecture performance.
Q: Please share with us how AGI’s technologies permit the United States to maintain space superiority.
A: Our space superiority software products provide capabilities that enable and enhance Space Situational Awareness [SSA], space protection strategies and Space Command and Control [C2] decision-making. More specifically, our products are used throughout the military space community for resident space object tracking, debris modeling, satellite recovery and maneuvering, anti-satellite threat and conjunction analyses, as well as real-time assessments of new foreign launch.
Q: We’ve observed the continued evolution of STK software—one of your flagship products. Discuss recent STK upgrades of note and near-term updates the community will see in the near future.
A: STK version 9, which will be released this spring, features significant data accessibility, usability and functionality enhancements. It offers greater accessibility to geospatial data, including Microsoft’s Virtual Earth raster imagery; new tools for generating and understanding results even faster; enhanced ability to customize the user interface and notable improvements in satellite mission design, aircraft mission modeling, communications, real-time systems, and distributed simulation architectures. These desktop capabilities can also be integrated into a user’s own software environment using our STK Engine development tool, or, for the deepest level of integration, with our low-level software component libraries.
Q: What sets AGI’s technology solutions apart from your competitors’?
A: Efficiency, the key strength of COTS software, is critical in today’s defense environment. Our COTS software is most frequently compared to in-house legacy systems or applications built to specification. But instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing new software, our products can be used out of the box. We believe this is a much more financially and time-efficient way to get the same capabilities. Also, our users gain 20 years of software development and testing that has been refined through dozens of iterations, resulting in a dramatic enhancement to our end users’ productivity, while shortening time to project or program. As the military continues to eliminate stovepiping, our COTS software provides a standard tool for all branches to share their mission design, simulation and analysis. Finally, our technologies incorporate the fourth dimension: time. This makes our analysis and visualization extremely dynamic, a significant benefit for situational awareness.
Q: Please discuss AGI’s support for your products’ life cycle, in particular, your emphasis on training.
A: We constantly hear from our users that we get high marks for our customer support, that they “answer the phone and stay on the phone until our issue is resolved.” I think that’s because we want our customers to be successful using our software, especially since we are asking them to rely on our expertise versus an in-house team. Our responsiveness is a key enabler to their loyalty and productivity. Along with that, we have training for all skill levels from basic entry-level courses to specialized workshops held at our offices, as well as locations convenient to our customers both nationally and internationally. We can also come to your site for custom training. People always tell us that in one week they’ve learned skills that they can put to use immediately at work. We also offer mostly free workshops, Webinars, seminars, users’ conferences and user group meetings throughout the year where people can meet with our subject matter experts, network with peers and use the products in a hands-on environment.
Q: Briefly describe your AGI Components product portfolio.
A: AGI Components are lightweight software libraries built on the same algorithms as STK. Components can be used by developers to add dynamic analysis into any application, multi-user Web application or piece of a service- oriented architecture [SOA]. AGI currently offers six component libraries, with many more on the way based on initial user feedback. We have a free AGI Components Software Development Kit [SDK] on the AGI Developer Network for anyone that wants to test-drive these products. ♦