In order to respond to growing threats, sprawling suburbs and complex interoperability challenges between legacy systems and new ones states and municipalities are deploying large infrastructure networks. These networks link up everything from traffic lights to homeland security systems and rely on censors, cameras and transmitters to report data back to officials about the overall condition of the network. To meet this demand, a growing number of private companies are offering middleware solutions that give both legacy and new systems the ability to work together and leverage new reporting technology.
Intergraph Government Solutions was recently honored at the GovSec 2012 Conference for its middleware solution for critical infrastructure – EdgeFrontier. Billed as the “ultimate Swiss army knife” for creating interfaces by integrating various types of data, events, and control functions, EdgeFrontier can be added to networks or embedded into the company’s infrastructure options as part of the product suite.
EdgeFrontier was originally developed by West Virginia-based, company Augusta Systems which was acquired by Intergraph last year. EdgeFrontier is set up to work as a data integrator, compiling reports from all of the areas where it is used and displaying them back to officials in a single view. The middleware can also be configured remotely, supporting data normalization across scenarios – cutting costs and saving bandwidth.
“We’ve had a lot of interest from systems integrators as well as the government security market,” says Ken Dickerman, Senior Manager, Integraph in an interview with CivSource.
According to Dickerman, EdgeFrontier started gaining attention from security professionals when it was used to provide live grounds monitoring when the Olympics were held in Canada a few years ago. Since then, it has been steadily drawing new clients including the city of Richmond, Virginia which uses EdgeFrontier to provide integration between municipal and federal homeland security and first responder networks.
Now, when an alert happens that needs state level response the system converts it to all required formats for both state and federal networks and then broadcasts the alert out to other state systems. “Using EdgeFrontier allows us to manage those configurations without recoding anything. All of the work is done through configurations and XML,” Dickerman said.
