Apple technology improves combat awareness for troops
After Jason Barton and Michael Walsh watched their Silicon Valley jobs disappear in the dot-com bust, they took the lessons they’d learned in technology and — along with David Barton — pledged to create a business to address real market needs. The result of that promise was EchoStorm, a company that pioneers rich media distribution through innovative technologies. Today EchoStorm remains a small operation — but it’s been winning some of the biggest contracts in video data delivery in industries ranging from Hollywood to the U.S. military.
When EchoStorm was awarded a contract to participate in a U.S. Joint Forces Command Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration called Multisensor Aerospace-Ground Joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) Interoperability Coalition (MAJIIC) to explore new video intelligence delivery models, EchoStorm chose Apple to help turn its vision into a functioning solution.
From the business point of view, Xserve was exactly what we needed. It makes a terrific development platform with an open source framework. Apple gave us as much flexibility as possible in terms of development.
— David Barton, President, EchoStorm
With a high-stakes initiative focused on improving battlespace awareness and ISR support to time-sensitive operations, the Joint Forces Command sought new ways of sharing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data. The problem: Frontline troops typically operate at extremely disadvantaged conditions for data retrieval. With limited video data transmission bandwidth — routinely only 56K or less, the rough equivalent of a cell phone — armed forces commanders often were required to use specialized systems to access Full Motion Video (FMV) and spend critical time retrieving mission intelligence. Giving field commanders access to real-time intelligence data would help improve battlespace awareness and enable them to make decisions more effectively. In short, the right technology could help save lives.
Answering a critical need in the DoD
“Frontline users are truly disadvantaged,” explains David Barton, EchoStorm’s president. “They operate at low bandwidth with only intermittent connectivity. The challenge was finding an effective method of capturing and redistributing video data quickly under those conditions.”
EchoStorm’s approach — driving traditional warfare intelligence toward service-oriented architecture (SOA) technologies — caught the attention of its Department of Defense customer. Client/server architecture had become ineffective for ISR data delivery. DoD widely recognized the bottlenecks of stovepiped systems and charged forces to explore net-centric alternatives. EchoStorm adapted an existing product to support an SOA for collecting and disseminating ISR data from various intelligence systems in near real time and in low-bandwidth conditions — a solution that addressed the military’s exact frustrations.
The result was the ISR Information Service (ISRIS) Video System, a secure content delivery network connecting warfighters regardless of location, bandwidth, or device. Built on an SOA using web services and standards-based software, ISRIS Video converts raw video sensor data (high-frame-rate MPEG-2 transport streams) to MPEG-4 format and provides full-motion archiving, discovery, and dissemination to bandwidth-limited users.
EchoStorm used Apple Xserve G5 servers, Xserve RAID, and QuickTime to make the complex information retrieval and delivery easy to achieve. “ISRIS Video as a whole was a very complicated system tying together many intricate technologies,” says Barton. “But with Apple products, we were able to make the content delivery and interface very simple for the end user.”
