NGA Increases Commitment to ERDAS Products with 5-Year Contract Renewal

The following news was just distributed to the press:
ERDAS is pleased to announce that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) recently signed a 5-year contract renewal with ERDAS. The contract includes support and upgrades for NGA’s existing ERDAS software holdings and preferred buying arrangements for additional products, licenses and software maintenance renewals.

With this contract, NGA has expanded its ERDAS investment by 20%, meeting an increased demand across the organization for ERDAS products and software licenses. ERDAS has been providing commercial image processing software to NGA since its inception as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. NGA has continued to increase its investment in ERDAS’ offering, with thousands of licenses for ERDAS software applications. This renewed investment signifies NGA’s continued loyalty to the ERDAS brand and products.

“ERDAS values its relationship with NGA tremendously and was pleased to offer them an agreement that will allow them to use leading geospatial software solutions at a significant savings. NGA’s renewed commitment to ERDAS software for another five years is a vote of confidence for ERDAS that we are extremely proud of,” said Joel Campbell, President, ERDAS. “This agreement also benefits the greater geospatial community, as the work we’ve done to meet the precise standards of NGA have created a more exceptional product portfolio to offer the rest of the industry.”

NGA collects and processes geospatial imagery to produce geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) products that present physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth. NGA’s timely, relevant and exceptionally accurate GEOINT supports improved decision-making for national security objectives and enables the United States military to remain at peak readiness to protect the nation. GEOINT from NGA also supports multiple humanitarian endeavors. In 2005, NGA provided imagery to support FEMA and other first responders after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and in 2007 it provided over 150 GEOINT products to help combat the California wildfires.

NGA currently owns licenses for most products in the ERDAS portfolio, including ERDAS IMAGINE and LPS, their add-on modules, and ERDAS APOLLO.

ERDAS IMAGINE 2011 Coming Soon

Here we are again, another year later and ERDAS is about to put out another software release. ERDAS IMAGINE 2011 will meet its scheduled release next month. At this time, I will not cover what all is in 2011, as that is for the World Tour Events and soon to be released on the erdas.com website.

Also, I have spoke with Frank Warmerdam and the integration of the v4.1 of the ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK into GDAL is going very well. It should make the GDAL v1.8 release due out this year as well.

One subject I will speak of on is the ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK use within ERDAS IMAGINE. ERDAS has bumped the IMAGINE Essentials input file size for ECW and JPEG2000 creation from 10Gpixels to 250Gpixels and in IMAGINE Advantage from 100Gpixels to 500Gpixels.

Transparency layers can be created with new compressions in Exporter and MosaicPro. There is a new tool to add ECW Transparency layers to existing ECW files without re-compressing the data too.

Link to ERDAS download...