by Rob Fernandez

As the computing industry continues to evolve at a break-neck pace, with no signs of slowing anytime soon, the satellite industry is also experiencing a golden age of sorts with regard to commercial off the shelf (COTS) software solutions. Since its inception, the satellite industry has made use of software systems, but companies active in this specialized branch of the software market are reporting that the traditional "legacy" systems of the past are steadily giving way to COTS offerings. Though challenges still remain, these satellite software providers are united in the opinion that this industry segment holds great promise and growth potential.

The Market Five Years Ago

Though software has been a part of the satellite industry since the beginning, the past five years have witnessed a significant change in the way satellite companies view and acquire software systems.

Before launching into a discussion of past and present software markets, it is important to note that the majority of satellite software suites fall into one of two categories. First, there are the monitor and control packages, which keep track of far-flung satellite assets, both on the ground and in orbit. These systems allow satellite operators and users to coordinate the functions of a complex satellite constellation, for example, or monitor the status of an entire network of ground stations and their component pieces. For earth station networks, a great advantage comes from being able to remotely monitor and operate these components from one central location.

Dave Siegel, director of marketing with Gensym, a developer of software systems for a variety of industries, including satellites, notes that the satellite industry is distinct from other industries in the high level of importance placed on mission-critical solutions. These types of software must run for days, even weeks or months, with total reliability.

The second major category of satellite software is devoted to simulation and analysis. These programs simulate satellite constellations in orbit, and how they interact with the earth stations on the ground. This allows the software user to quickly visualize a complex satellite network, and can be invaluable when coordinating multiple networks or looking for an optimal network configuration. Ultimately, the uses for both types of software are limited only by the user’s and designer’s ingenuity, and any attempt to catalog all of the various applications for which they can be used is doomed to be incomplete.

Despite the differing applications for satellite software solutions, all prospective providers of these products face similar challenges and market forces. The entire market for satellite software is undergoing an evolution, and has come a long way from the earliest days of the industry.

"In years past, satellite software systems were always proprietary, they were expensive, and they were rarely remoted," says Mark Sivertsen, vice president of marketing for M&C Systems, the provider of a COTS remote monitoring and control system, named Presence. Sivertsen also points out that such software systems couldn’t accommodate multiple vendors, as each hardware supplier provided a proprietary software package for its equipment that was not compatible with the packages from other manufacturers. "That posed a real difficulty for the end-user to get visibility on their entire communications chain," Sivertsen explains.

Another obstacle that John Pahl, director of Transfinite Systems, the developer of the Visualyse simulation/analysis software suite, points out is the distinct "user-UNfriendliness" of most legacy systems. He goes on to say that the software at that time didn’t have much attention given to the front end, or user interface. This made it even harder to train new people for these systems.

The saving grace for software, according to both executives, was the standardization that occurred around the Microsoft and PC computer technology. The PC represented the birth of a viable COTS solution. As PCs and their operating systems grew more and more powerful and reliable, the satellite software industry rode this rising tide.

Even so, Paul Graziani, CEO of Analytical Graphics Inc. (AGI), a provider of simulation software, recalls that five years ago there was considerable thought on the advantages of COTS systems, but very little buying. He ascribes this hesitancy to a lack of experience with COTS solutions. "Before COTS, the systems were all custom-designed, and once the system fulfilled its purpose, there was very little reuse," Graziani says.

According to Graziani, the eventual adoption of COTS technology came about thanks to early pioneers who were willing to deploy these as-yet-untested systems. Graziani classifies these pioneers into two groups. The first group he calls the "tech enthusiasts:" individuals who crave the cutting edge of technology, for whom reliability is not as important as the thrill of a new technical breakthrough. These individuals will not be interested in mainstream technology, Graziani explains. Although he concedes they may get burned more often than others, these tech enthusiasts are a vital source of support for all new technologies.

The second wave of support for early COTS efforts came from the people Graziani calls the "visionaries." "These individuals had the foresight to look at where the industry should be," he says. They came from the research and development labs of both the big names in the satellite industry such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as from the smaller companies.

Other companies, such as Pahl’s Transfinite, gained a foothold in the industry by involving themselves in influential organizations, such as the ITU. Pahl is one of seven members of the ITU’s software task group, a body charged with developing the analysis software necessary for the ITU to evaluate interference limits and coordination plans. Transfinite provides its Visualyse package free-of-charge to the international organization.

Perhaps the most compelling reason for the adoption of COTS software has been the cost savings that such a solution allows. Bill Page and Scott Miller, the co-founders of Voyager Telecommunications, a provider of traffic management and booking software for teleports and other telecommunications related businesses, report that writing and implementing software such as its Automated Traffic Management System (ATMS) typically takes several years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even with this expensive outlay of time and money, there was still no guarantee the result would be an effective piece of software. With Voyager’s ATMS solution, a customer is provided with an open-ended piece of software that is 80 percent usable in its standard version, requiring only 20 percent customization to suit their specific needs.

Graziani agrees that the economics are irrefutable. "Our Satellite Tool Kit (STK) suite contains 2.5 million lines of code," he explains, "which would take about $250 million to re-invent." Add to this the drop in development time, from three years to overnight, and the complete lack of financial or operational risk, and it does indeed seem hard to imagine how the satellite industry ever got along without COTS solutions.

Current Challenges

Today, satellite software has achieved a much higher level of acceptance. With such major players as the Department of Defense (DoD) looking heavily into COTS software and the commercial market already investing extensively in this more cost-effective solution, Sivertsen estimates that approximately 70 to 80 percent of the companies that comprise his company’s market employ some version of COTS software, as opposed to the older, custom-built legacy systems.

Graziani also agrees that at the highest levels of satellite companies, the cost savings of COTS software has resulted in a 100 percent buy in for these solutions. However, he warns that COTS solutions still meet resistance as the procurement process moves down the company structure to the in-house software engineers and others doing the actual coding. These are the most crucial people to win over in any procurement process, Graziani confides. "They are the ones who understand the technology and have to make the decision on which route to take."

Unfortunately, Graziani admits that there is a certain element of pride that these engineers take in their internal systems, and this pride often blocks the adoption of an outside COTS software package. Graziani has dubbed this phenomenon the "pretty baby contest." "There is still a large degree of momentum to fight, some 40 years worth of proprietary systems," he says. So while the cost savings continue to appeal to upper management, Graziani says his chief block these days is an "I’ll do it myself" mentality. He argues that the R&D resources used by such companies to "re-invent the wheel" for satellite software would be better spent developing new technology.

Another challenge that strikes the monitor and control segment of the software industry in particular is a quest for standards. While telemetry and simulation software systems can often function perfectly well as standalone systems, monitor and control packages must interact with a variety of different hardware types from a variety of different manufacturers.

In fact, Ray Cavanagh, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for Newpoint Technologies, the developer of the Newpoint Compass earth station and device management control system, asserts that the telemetry and simulation segment of the software industry has moved faster towards COTS solutions than the monitor and control segment. This is due in large part to his segment’s dependency on ground-based hardware. "Our industry has a tendency to be very hardware intensive," Cavanagh explains. "However, in reality, it’s the software that runs the hardware. All of this equipment operates on proprietary protocols."

Because these proprietary protocols make interacting with the software management package difficult, each provider of such software must design separate software interfaces, or "drivers," for each piece of hardware. Cavanagh likens this process to adding a new printer and corresponding driver to an existing computer system, only with a far greater level of complexity. Given the multitude of devices available in the market, this can soon add up to a sizeable library of drivers that the software designers must develop, maintain and update as new products are introduced.

What Newpoint has done to meet this need is develop a Software Developer’s Toolkit that the company provides to hardware manufacturers for free. With this toolkit, hardware manufacturers can design their own drivers for their devices. This toolkit is also available to the individual end user, giving each user three avenues for obtaining new drivers: Newpoint, the hardware manufacturer or designing it themselves.

M&C Systems also is devoting extensive effort to keeping its driver library as up-to-date as possible. Sivertsen says his company has adopted a proactive approach to driver design, seeking out the latest products and constantly adding new drivers to its library. In fact, he estimates that M&C’s library grows by 30 to 40 percent each year.

A farther-reaching solution that Newpoint and Cavanagh are currently championing is the concept of a "protocol interpreter." He explains that this interpreter will be a standardized piece of software for the industry that will automatically adapt current drivers to suit existing software management systems and retrofit older drivers as well.

The problem lies in getting the rest of the industry behind such an undertaking. In order to work, all of the software developers must agree on a format to which they can all write their drivers; a format that will work with each software solution. Newpoint has been undertaking discussions with the Senate Arms Committee on just this subject, and Cavanagh is hopeful that with such impressive backing, standardization will soon become a reality.

One final challenge all of the software executives have voiced has been finding qualified personnel. Certainly the number of software engineers is constantly growing as computers become more and more important to everyday life, but finding engineers that also have a firm grounding in satellite technology is an entirely different proposition. In fact, many of the companies mentioned here were founded by these same software/satellite prodigies when they realized just how rare their talents were.

Reaching For The Future

Considering both the potential and the challenges inherent in the satellite software market, the future of this industry promises to be quite exciting. Despite the hurdles outlined earlier, all of the companies report steady and, in some cases, explosive growth.

For Cavanagh, the future direction of his industry is clear: it must migrate towards standards. Graziani sees a lot of hard work ahead, and considerable footwork that needs to be done in order to overcome lingering resistance to the concept of COTS solutions. Voyager’s Page and Miller describe software develpoment as "an incredibly laborious, time consuming and expensive task if undertaken internally."

Satellite software developers such as Transfinite are devoting their future efforts on broadening the market base by anticipating future needs for software analysis. For example Pahl, in his capacity with the ITU, saw that the interference limits the Skybridge broadband platform was planning to propose would become a focus of much scrutiny at the past WRC-97. Thus by the time WRC-97 was being held, software to simulate these limits was already built into the latest version of Transfinite’s software.

Chris Bourassa, president of L3 Storm Control Systems, a provider of monitor and control software solutions, notes that building upon existing satellite control systems is another strong future market. He goes on to note that as satellite operators augment their existing satellites, they are interested in upgrading their ground systems to a common solution that can operate, often in a highly automated manner, all of their spacecraft, regardless of manufacturer. In addition, they are developing scalable solutions based on a common software architecture, which will augment existing customer systems to control new spacecraft buses and payloads.

With each software developer taking a distinctive tack on pushing the envelope of satellite software applications, this industry will remain one of the most dynamic segments of the larger satellite picture. Challenges are being aggressively addressed and overcome, and satellite software is definitely a market to watch, both now and in the future.

Rob Fernandez is the managing editor of Via Satellite.