By Björn Möller, President
The year 2022 has been very different. On the one hand, COVID restrictions have been lifted as the pandemic is fading away, making life better and doing business easier. But on the other hand, Russian aggression has changed the world, making it a less safe place to live and triggering a regression.
The simulation and training market
With an increased focus globally on defense efforts, we’ve seen a broader understanding of the need for collaboration within NATO, the EU, and the Western world. Consequently, the need for community-based Open Standards, provided by organizations like NATO, SISO, and IEEE, has become clearer than ever, gaining continued and increased support.
Traditional platform and aggregate-level simulation standards are now complemented by Simulation-to-C2, Space, and Cyber simulation standards. There are still proprietary frameworks being promoted, but the trend toward Open Standards-based solutions is clear.
The simulation and training market is again “open to business” with ITEC picking up, followed by a lively and thriving I/ITSEC trade show. Technologies like VR and XR are still going strong, now with even better graphics based on state-of-the-art game engines like Unreal Engine. Defense organizations express an increasing need for multi-domain training solutions, with cross-domain security solutions as a key enabler, and possibly some scalability requirements.
Pitch in 2022
Pitch had another exciting year supporting projects and customers, such as the Viking civil-military exercise, the UK Royal Air Force Gladiator Program, the French Army SERKET program, and the NASA Artemis program. Pitch also made substantial progress and contributions to Navy, Space, Cyber, and many other domains.
In 2022 we have sold COTS products to more than 20 countries. We have demonstrated our products at trade shows like ITEC, I/ITSEC, DSET, EUROSATORY, and more. We have expanded with several new staff eager to learn about simulation, interoperability, and standards, and to build a career within the industry.
On the R&D side, we continue to invest in open standards based distributed simulation technologies. Our developers have already produced early HLA 4 versions of several Pitch products, made our products more cloud-friendly and scalable, added features to Pitch Debrief, added more radio effects to Pitch Talk and extended our Pitch Unreal Engine Connector.
As always, we’ve also made major contributions to NATO, IEEE, and SISO standards. We have collaborated with several universities, both with researchers and in student outreach programs. All in all, an exciting year!
Looking ahead
We now look forward to 2023, when we will continue supporting our current customers and start working with several new customers. We hope to see more staff coming on board, new product updates being released, and several new standards, like HLA 4 and RPR FOM 3 getting their final approval. We will continue working with old and new domains, for example, presenting at SpaceCom Expo and delivering standards based Cyber simulation prototypes in the UK.
If you want to learn more about our plans, products, or services, I encourage you to get in touch with us to see how we can be of assistance!
Happy New Year!
Björn Möller