A small, private Virginia company makes waves in simulation industry

By Margaret Roth

From sophistication comes simplicity. Never has the concept been more apt than at Advanced Simulation Technology inc., better known as ASTi, whose customers increasingly “just want a solution,” something they can plug in and start using, yet “with all the bells and whistles,” as co-founder and chief executive officer Jim Norton puts it.

“Our challenge is sort of like the digital watch,” he said. “It looks simple, and it’s got to be cheap, but that comes from a lot of sophistication underneath.”

ASTi’s stock in trade is Digital Audio Communication Systems (DACS), which it sells all over the world primarily for military use. Now the company is branching out. At the high end of the product spectrum is a next-generation platform that will add a graphical user interface to its tried-and-true audio capabilities. At the other end of the spectrum, the company has completed development of a Windows-based, desktop-oriented aural-cue system it calls PCver.

When the company began in 1989, its principals were not sure exactly what they wanted their product to be. The three co-founders—Norton, Robert Butterfield and Patrick Gaffney—came from Hughes Training, a division of Hughes Aircraft.

They decided to form a company to produce “some kind of commercial subsystem,” Norton said. They settled on aural-cue systems, which they could deliver affordably and in a much smaller, PC-based package than was the norm at the time.

And so ASTi was born.

More than a decade later, privately owned ASTi enjoys an average 15 percent annual growth in revenue. Based in the Washington suburb of Herndon, Va., ASTi controls more than 95 percent of the market for such solutions, Norton said.

ASTi’s basic product is a preconfigured platform built to commercial standards and adaptable to an ever-growing list of requirements, such as tactical data link and high-fidelity terrain. The product has evolved from one with simple intercom connections with a stand-alone trainer to one suited for distributed interactive simulation involving multiple trainers.

“Most of our business is… lots and lots of separate orders,” Norton said.

In recent months, ASTi has delivered a 185-operator communication system to the Dismounted Battlespace Battle Lab at Fort Benning, Ga.; two DACS systems to an Australian systems integrator, John Mitchell Computing, for the Australian Department of Defence; 10 DACS systems to Link Simulation & Training for the first of several Boeing F/A-18C Distributed Mission Training systems at Naval Air Station Oceana, Va.; and 20 DACS systems and 12 Telestra systems to Lockheed Martin for installation on new Lockheed Martin F-16 Mission Training Center pilot training systems at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany.

Besides DACS, ASTi produces a platform it call Synapse, to provide networked communications for multiple vehicles with multiple operators, interfacing with a satellite-based Internet protocol network that cannot be disrupted by earthquakes, making it particularly suitable for emergency response. ASTi recently shipped two Synapse systems to the 61st Air Base Group Civil Engineering Unit at Los Angeles Air Force Base, Calif., for readiness and emergency response purposes, a step outside its traditional niche of training and simulation.

Now ASTi is hoping to step further away from that niche while maintaining its foothold in the simulation market. Its basic DACS software tool, Model Builder, has given rise to Model Builder Visual, a Linux-based platform with a graphical user interface and “intelligent debug features” that will make it easier to use, Norton said.

“It’s amazing that we see now, in training and simulation, a sense of urgency in these exercises,” said Jeff Mowery, a partner in ASTi and its director of project engineering. “We see things where they need something in 30 days. And so you have to be able to respond not only with the product that will do the job, but in those cases, they don’t want to learn the tool. They don’t want to even read the manual.”

The first deliveries of Model Builder Visual are scheduled for the first quarter of 2004. Among ASTi’s beta customers are Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., where ASTi previously delivered DACS systems to the E-2C Test and Evaluation Lab, and NLX Corp.

As new programs and new requirements arise, they will be incorporated into Model Builder Visual, while ASTi will continue to serve existing users of the Model Builder platform, Mowery said.

ASTi’s military customer base is not its only target for Model Builder Visual. In coming years, the company is looking to enter an entirely new market with the more sophisticated preconfigured Telestra product, for the customers who “don’t care whether that’s got a mouse on a treadmill or a Pentium” in it, Norton said.

“We’ve been approached by police and fire” departments, he said. The Federal Emergency Management Agency recently installed an ASTi digital communications system at its Emergency Management Institute, in Emmitsburg, Md. “And school systems, hospital systems, launch sites — all these people need very specialized communication systems that are configured to their particular requirements. They need multiple channels,” Norton said.

“What I think we’ll be able to do with this new product is subdivide it so that the complexity that this product is capable of is hidden. We’ll be able to define a little user interface for you that will hide everything else.”

ASTi has no plans to go public, nor to merge with another company, Norton said. “We have completely flat organization,” allowing for perhaps three times the efficiency of a typical defense industry organization. “Everybody here knows what their job is. There are no timesheets.

“We all feel we’re doing something useful.”