Companies team up for high-tech map quest

LOVELAND – When it comes to digital images, most people are familiar with jpeg files, which can capture plenty of detail for cell-phone pictures and Facebook photos. But for pilots who need to download images quickly in order to read a 3-D map of a city – to discern military targets or ground hazards – jpeg files can come up short.

Or as Jeff Poore, president of the Loveland-based information-sciences firm, Numerica Corp., said, “They’re great for pictures, but not for flying.”

Numerica concentrates on scientific and mathematical problem solving. In a partnership with TechniGraphics, a geospatial-services company with Fort Collins offices, it has developed new GIS – geographic information system – technology that can decompress and produce accurate three-dimensional digital maps and then wirelessly stream the data to mobile devices.

The advance, called GIS Encoder, is the latest government-contract success story for both small companies, and the product is moving forward just as the firms are each going through a major growth spurt.

Maps for government work

Headquartered in Wooster, Ohio, TechniGraphics was founded in 1982 and now has offices in Fort Collins and Madrid, Spain. Specializing in digital mapping, data conversion and geospatial engineering and design, the company’s principal work has been through government contracts for defense and intelligence agencies. Since 2003, the company has been one of six prime contractors to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the smallest of the group.

Rapid growth in revenue and staff size has earned TechniGraphics yearly recognition on the Inc. 5000, a list of the fastest growing small companies published by Inc. Magazine. According to the latest list, released in August, TechniGraphics grew 71 percent between 2006 and 2009, when it counted 600 employees and $50 million in revenue.

The steady expansion didn’t go unnoticed by larger companies, several of which began expressing interest in acquiring TechniGraphics in 2009, said Dee Vaidya, who, with his wife, Mary, purchased the company in 1994.

A banker helped executives evaluate roughly 60 potential suitors before eventually introducing TechniGraphics to CACI International, a worldwide IT company with 120 offices and 13,000 employees that also caters to government defense and intelligence.

“We have very complementary skills, so the kind of work we do fits very well,´ said Scott Simmons, TechniGraphics’ executive vice president for technology, based in Fort Collins.

The deal should enable personnel from TechniGraphics to continue digital mapping and imagery work, including new opportunities to work on classified projects. The companies closed the deal November 1. According to CACI’s quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the acquisition of TechniGraphics and Virginia-based Applied Systems Research Inc. is worth approximately $127.5 million.

“What this does is allow us to play on a much bigger field,” Vaidya said.

The merger should not have any negative effects on staffing at TechniGraphics’ Wooster and Fort Collins offices, where the CACI name will now be used.

Spinoff from CSU work

Numerica has also boomed in the last few years, reporting a 154 percent increase in revenue over the past four years. Colorado State University math professor Aubrey Poore founded the company in 1996, as a spinoff of applied mathematics work he was doing with IBM at the time on missile tracking defense. The university encouraged Poore to commercialize his technology and apply for patents, and Numerica has emerged as a for-profit research company that generates extremely complex algorithms to account for objects’ movement through space.

Clients have included Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman and, since 2002, the company has proven successful at earning government Small Business Innovation Research grants to support R&D and look for commercial applications. After concentrating on military and missile defense projects, Numerica has widened its focus to include cyber security, chemical detection, “space junk” inventories, and GIS. The company recently added three new employees and is hiring another dozen, and has just opened a Pasadena, Calif. office.

“We’re trying to stay true to our core competencies, and apply them to different markets,´ said President Jeff Poore, son of founder Aubrey Poore.

The GIS Encoder software fits right in with those ambitions. The technology will address a dangerous shortcoming for military pilots flying over urban environments. Typically, image data that must be decompressed onto devices with memory constraints – such as mobile phones and PDAs – will lose fine details such as elevation and other 3-D elements. The deficiencies are especially troubling for low-flying pilots who need an accurate read on antennae towers, power lines, trees and even church spires when they’re scanning a digital map.

When the U.S. Army put out a solicitation for the project through its SBIR grant listings, Numerica determined its staff was equipped to tackle the heady algorithms behind the program, but the company was lacking geospatial services.

“We could bring the scientific horsepower and understanding, but we needed a partner that understood the marketplace,” Jeff Poore said.

Numerica and Technigraphics/CACI are both members of GIS Alley, the regional GIS industry cluster. Personnel from the two companies had first crossed paths via a networking group of Northern Colorado defense contractors several years earlier, so when their staffs met to discuss a collaboration on the GIS Encoder project, each knew what the other brought to the table.

Numerica had its mathematical brainpower. Technigraphics brought its geospatial expertise. It was the GIS technology equivalent of chocolate and peanut butter. The collaboration has enabled the companies to win a Phase II SBIR grant from the government to further develop the product and explore commercial uses.

Jeff Poore anticipates the GIS Encoder package could be his company’s first “real, commercial, non-government product.” Uses could come for air-traffic management and as a plug-in application for consumer GIS software programs.

“GIS is an area ripe for innovation,” Poore added.

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