|
By John Aguilar
Staff Writer
The Boulder County
Business Report
BOULDER
-- After enough time spent leading soldiers on military
exercises at Fort Hood in Texas, Army Lt. Fred Weigel knows
how cumbersome it is to haul around the thick and heavy
field manuals used by platoon leaders. Thanks to a Boulder
company, he can now take the necessary information into the
field in a lightweight, digital format and leave the bulky
manuals back at barracks.
“In
the past, a company leader would have to carry a big
organizer and worry about getting it wet and muddy,” he
said. “Now with the technology we have, you can put (that
information) in your pocket.”The pocket-sized technology
Weigel and other leaders in the U.S. Army have access to
comes from Warrior Solutions Inc. in Boulder. Not yet three
years old, Warrior has developed Platoon Warrior, a software
package for handheld Palm Pilots that is being used by
soldiers in the war against terrorism.
Platoon
Warrior has two major functions. The first is Platoon
Personnel, which allows Army leaders to instantly get and
input information on the soldiers under their command,
replacing the heavy leader book. Information, like a
soldier’s medical history, equipment list, awards and
licenses earned, and educational background, is available to
a platoon leader with the tap of a stylus on a Palm
Pilot’s screen.
The
commanding officer can take the information from his Palm
device and, using the device’s docking cradle, can move
information back and forth between the Palm and his desktop
or laptop computer back at the office. With this ability to
constantly update the information in the Palm device,
Warrior says it is a vastly more efficient way for the
military to conduct roll call.
The
other part of the Platoon Warrior program is Platoon Leader,
which gives leaders access to relevant military data,
regulations and protocols while in the field. Platoon Leader
is an electronic version of the combat regulations,
battlefield logistics, risk-management strategies and
medical information that military leaders currently carry in
the form of thick and heavy field manuals.
“The
Platoon Personnel is our bread and butter, and Platoon
Leader is complementary to Personnel,” said Catherine
Lawrence, president and chief executive officer of Warrior.
Lawrence, who has worked with IBM and Exabyte Corp. to bring
to market new high-tech products, co-founded Warrior with
retired Lt. Col. Charles M. Stibrany in late 1999.
“The
trick of it all for us was defining the key elements in a
checklist or outline format to minimize the time needed to
find the information,” said Stibrany, who over his 24-year
Army career has led platoons in Bosnia and South Korea.
After being exposed to Palm technology in Bosnia, Stibrany
felt the small device could have useful applications on the
battlefield and elsewhere in military life.
Not
long after, Warrior was born. It quickly developed a
partnership with Palm Inc., writing its Platoon Warrior
program to function on the Palm operating system. “They
have the dominant market share. We liked the simplicity of
their operating system. We wanted it to be intuitive – you
tap it and it works,” Stibrany said.
Palm
controls about three-quarters of the market for personal
digital assistants (PDAs) and openly allows programmers to
write to its devices. At least 175,000 software developers
have registered to develop programs based on the Palm
operating system.
“We
have multiple partnerships with vendors like Warrior,”
said John Inkley, manager of federal sales for Palm Inc.,
the market leader in the manufacture of handheld computers.
“You can’t have every soldier carrying around two-inch
Army survival manuals. Instead, you can carry a
one-quarter-inch Palm. This changes the way a soldier,
sailor and airman does his job.” Stibrany used his
extensive military connections to begin selling the program
to the Army about six months ago. An individual can buy the
program for $50, platoon packages with six licenses go for
$250, and battalion packages with 150 licenses cost $5,700.
All versions of the program are available for download from
www.warriorsolutions.com. The nine-person company, surviving
off of angel funding, would not disclose revenues, but
Lawrence said Warrior is not yet profitable. She hopes to
reach profitability sometime this year.
While
Warrior’s primary customer is the Army, it has done
limited sales to the Marine Corps and to the Air Force. It
is also working on a British version of its software and is
planning on building versions for the militaries of other
NATO countries. Meanwhile, it continues to develop up to
nine more modules to add to its military software suite.
If
its preliminary negotiations with Broomfield-based
SoftSource Corp. pan out, Warrior’s future software
products may look a lot different than what it currently
offers. SoftSource, which will change its name to Catarra
Inc. this month, develops graphic-rich platforms for mobile
computers, giving the content on handheld devices the same
look as desktop machines.
“We use very sophisticated mathematical technology and
high-end programmers to design a vector-based graphics
solution,” said Rick Brennan, SoftSource’s president and
chief executive officer. “It’s transparent to the people
who use the program and to the people who build for it.”
Lawrence said the richer interface could be a real advantage
for soldiers, particularly in the kind of urban and
uncertain warfare currently going on in Afghanistan. “You
can imagine how useful it would be to have photos of people
you need to watch out for,” she said. “It could also
provide layouts of buildings, equipment and street maps that
go into very fine detail.” The only limitation to the
Platoon Warrior program that Lt. Weigel noticed was its
inability to directly import data from a database like
Microsoft Access. Weigel said Warrior told him it was
working on adding that functionality in the future.
February 8, 2002
|
Home
