Appistry has announced that three leaders in the geospatial intelligence industry have deployed Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (Appistry EAF) as the platform for their geospatial intelligence applications. GeoEye and the University of Missouri's Center for Geospatial Intelligence (CGI) have all deployed Appistry EAF to help them achieve results that were unattainable using traditional technology approaches.

Appistry, a member of the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), is present at USGIF-sponsored GEOINT Symposium 2006. In partnership with GeoEye and CGI, Appistry will be demonstrating for conference attendees the respective companies' fabric-enabled geospatial intelligence applications.

With national security at stake, the intelligence community is under constant pressure to turn massive volumes of raw data into actionable information before a threat becomes a crisis. Appistry EAF provides a "scale without fail" application environment that enables intelligence agencies and their non-government suppliers to run large-scale data-processing applications more quickly, easily and cost-effectively than previously possible.

"Appistry EAF increases agility, while allowing agencies and other customers to decrease the cost and complexity of running current and future intelligence applications," said Kevin Haar, Appistry chief executive officer. "For today's applications, Appistry EAF makes scalability easy, while ensuring reliability, eliminating proprietary hardware and slashing operations costs. And Appistry EAF helps organizations bring tomorrow's applications from the drawing board or research lab to the analyst desktop more quickly than ever before. This allows more sophisticated data analyses to identify more intricate patterns of activity in less time."

GeoEye is the leading provider of commercial satellite imagery to the U.S. military and intelligence community. To serve these customers, GeoEye processes massive amounts of raw image data through a series of compute-intensive "ingest" and "exploitation" applications. With three earth imaging satellites currently in orbit and a fourth, higher resolution, satellite soon to launch, these applications must scale to handle ever-increasing data volumes, and must be highly reliable to avoid delays in processing the data.

GeoEye chose to implement Appistry EAF in order to better manage the increasing complexity of application development efforts, escalating infrastructure costs, hardware obsolescence, and platform rigidity. Appistry's "scale without fail" application environment provides GeoEye with effortless scaling, enhanced reliability, reduced hardware acquisition and maintenance costs, and greater development simplicity. As a result, GeoEye is reducing the cost and complexity of running its applications and increasing its competitive agility.

"Traditional approaches to developing software applications at the scale required by our business is a growing challenge for our developers, not to mention the burden on our pocketbook of buying and operating expensive proprietary hardware," said Ray Helmering, VP Photogrammetric Engineering at GeoEye. "Appistry is providing the solution. By relying on the application fabric to provide scalability, reliability and manageability, we can leave our infrastructure concerns behind and focus on providing maximum value to our customers."

The Center for Geospatial Intelligence (CGI) at the University of Missouri – Columbia is pioneering research and development into advanced image query and retrieval systems for geospatial intelligence. Under a grant funded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), CGI has developed GeoIRIS, the Geospatial Information Retrieval & Indexing System. GeoIRIS is unique among satellite imagery retrieval systems as it is content-based, allowing the image database to be queried using image content, objects and features sets, in addition to text-based meta-data.

GeoIRIS makes use of computationally intense feature extraction algorithms, content-based image retrieval techniques, high-dimensional indexing structures and several other technologies to provide relevant retrieval of geospatial intelligence information. CGI selected Appistry EAF in order to significantly reduce the time it took to process its entire database. CGI researchers were able to easily deploy GeoIRIS' existing Linux-based application for object feature extraction to an application fabric of 25 computers, allowing a dataset that previously took weeks to process to be delivered in less than 8 hours.

"Our partnership with Appistry has dramatically increased our team's ability to quickly process satellite imagery," said Curt Davis, Ph.D., Croft Distinguished Professor at University of Missouri – Columbia, and director of its Center for Geospatial Intelligence. "Appistry EAF also gives us the ability to easily increase our computing capability using inexpensive computers, which will be of huge value to us as we bring new datasets online."