I/ITSEC 2008 Trip Report

David Boker
Senior Director, Business Development Group, Microsoft ACES Studio
Microsoft Corp.

For decades , enterprise-class simulations were stand-alone solutions designed to meet the specific needs of individual customers. These custom solutions were expensive to build, purchase, and maintain and had lengthy lead times for delivery.  The Microsoft ESP team had an opposite vision: to create a low-cost, PC-based software development platform upon which any simulation solution could be built. Our hope was that industry solution providers and training organizations would eventually come to see ESP as technology that empowers them, simplifies their jobs, and saves them significant time and money.

At the I/ITSEC 2008 conference in early-December in Orlando, we saw many encouraging signs that our strategy is quickly gaining supporters.  If there’s one overall theme that emerged from all the amazing technology demos we saw this year, it is integration. Hardware and software companies are working together, combining existing solutions to create new ones.  This shift is great news for Microsoft ESP, our partners and customers.

Last year at I/ITSEC we were a brand new player in the industry, having just announced ESP. This year it was clear that people understood why we were there, what our platform offers, and what we’re trying to accomplish. The five ESP demo stations in our booth showed how ESP can be integrated with other technologies, content, functionality, and hardware.

A station running ESP 1.0 integrated with Microsoft Virtual Earth was a great example of how ESP can be integrated with other technologies.  ESP Developer Evangelist Todd Landstad spent most of the show at this station (and did most of the work putting it together). He flew a UAV Predator add-on on one screen, and showed both 2D and 3D views of the UAV’s real-time flight path in Virtual Earth. Audiences were pleased and impressed.

Dr. Kenji Takeda and his colleagues from the University of Southampton (U.K.) staffed an ESP station that showed a computational fluid dynamics demo integrating ESP 1.0 with Microsoft HPC Server 2008.  It showed a helicopter safely and properly landing on the back of a moving ship – a very difficult simulation to deliver due to the various drafts created by the movement of the ship. The HPC Server ran the calculations for the helicopter and ship wake interaction, and ESP provided the user interface and visualization. You can learn more about this project in their whitepaper on our website.

An F-16 cockpit trainer from ESP partner Flight Dynamix running on ESP 1.0 drew a lot of traffic to our booth.  ESP Business Development Manager Scott Andersen used this station to demonstrate how ESP can be integrated with realistic controls and cockpit environments to deliver affordable, highly realistic simulation environments.

In 2007, many customers and potential customers asked about ESP’s multi-channel capabilities, which did not then exist, so our team has been hard at work implementing this feature for ESP version 2. At I/ITSEC 2008 we showed some of the multi-channel work in progress, showcasing a helicopter scenario flying on three 60” Plasma screens in multi-channel. This station was pretty impressive, both visually and technologically.

Emerging from the 25+ year legacy of Microsoft Flight Simulator, ESP version 1.0 focused on the simulation of aviation. We’ve known all along that the military simulation market wants more, so at I/ITSEC 2008we gave them a taste of what’s to come. The team put together a great demo of the new ground vehicle capabilities coming in ESP 2.0, featuring a realistic MRAP training scenario. The demo received continuous high praise from people who saw how responsive we’ve been to the needs of the market.

Though it wasn’t difficult to convince folks on our team to fly south from Seattle for a week in the Florida sun, we all ironically spent most of our time indoors, staring at incredible simulations of the outdoors! The great news is that our booth wasn’t the only place to see ESP in action. Elsewhere on the show floor were companies demonstrating their own solutions built with ESP, including Adacel, Acron, Calytrix, NASA, Thales, SAIC and Stirling Dynamics Ltd, among others. If integration was the theme that emerged from this year’s show, it’s clear that some big players are already viewing ESP as a key component that helps makes all the integration possible.

While our team, partners, and customers were showing off what ESP looks like today and in the future, the rest of us were busy talking about it. We had many briefings with press and industry analysts that have resulted in favorable articles and comments in print and on the Web. Our own press release was picked up by a wide variety of local, national, and global news outlets.

At a presentation to our colleagues back in Redmond last week, everyone agreed that I/ITSEC 2008 was a big success for Microsoft ESP. Interestingly, a lot of folks on our Studio team who’ve never quite fully understood what we’re trying to do in this market finally got it when they saw pictures, read articles and heard stories from the conference. The solutions our partners and customers are building on our platform are already amazing and will continue to get better over time.

I look forward to seeing what our partners will have to show (and see) at I/ITSEC 2009. Hope to see you there with your ESP-based solution!