One of the greatest benefits of attending conferences such as ITEC, taking place this week in Prague, is the ability to talk face to face with some of the smaller but powerfully innovative companies on which so much of the future of the training and simulation community depends. One such company is Paris-based MASA Group, specialists in artificial intelligence-based modelling and simulation software.
Having grown in the last four or five years from a laboratory-style company providing services in a single country to a product and service oriented enterprise with customers in fifteen countries worldwide, MASA has achieved much in a short space of time. Its principal product, the SWORD immersive command and staff training platform, is undergoing a facelift and enhancement, based on the company’s very intimate relationship with the growing international community of users and SWORD v6.0 is being showcased in Prague for the first time.
“We release one or perhaps two major versions of SWORD per year and v6.0 focuses primarily on new and enhanced after action review features,” says Juan-Pablo Torres, MASA’s President and CEO. He goes on to point out that “the goal of simulation is to train, not just to exercise, and we therefore need to ensure there are good tools surrounding the simulation to enable users to optimise the training benefits.”
Adjacent markets continue to exercise a powerful attraction for MASA, with the civil security and emergency management markets in particular beginning to gain traction for the immediate future. The company is using ITEC, therefore, to unveil SYNERGY, a version of SWORD optimised for the emergency management and crisis response markets. In use with one customer since the end of 2014, the solution addresses the similarity in requirements simultaneously with the differences in culture and procedures between these markets and the military birthplace of SWORD.
New customers continue to join the rapidly expanding community of SWORD users. The Singapore Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) became a user in 2014, while the 15th country to adopt – Bangladesh – started to use SWORD as the basis for its future Computerised Wargames Centre – a part of Army Training & Doctrine Command – at the beginning of this year.
Having grown in the last four or five years from a laboratory-style company providing services in a single country to a product and service oriented enterprise with customers in fifteen countries worldwide, MASA has achieved much in a short space of time. Its principal product, the SWORD immersive command and staff training platform, is undergoing a facelift and enhancement, based on the company’s very intimate relationship with the growing international community of users and SWORD v6.0 is being showcased in Prague for the first time.
“We release one or perhaps two major versions of SWORD per year and v6.0 focuses primarily on new and enhanced after action review features,” says Juan-Pablo Torres, MASA’s President and CEO. He goes on to point out that “the goal of simulation is to train, not just to exercise, and we therefore need to ensure there are good tools surrounding the simulation to enable users to optimise the training benefits.”
Adjacent markets continue to exercise a powerful attraction for MASA, with the civil security and emergency management markets in particular beginning to gain traction for the immediate future. The company is using ITEC, therefore, to unveil SYNERGY, a version of SWORD optimised for the emergency management and crisis response markets. In use with one customer since the end of 2014, the solution addresses the similarity in requirements simultaneously with the differences in culture and procedures between these markets and the military birthplace of SWORD.
New customers continue to join the rapidly expanding community of SWORD users. The Singapore Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) became a user in 2014, while the 15th country to adopt – Bangladesh – started to use SWORD as the basis for its future Computerised Wargames Centre – a part of Army Training & Doctrine Command – at the beginning of this year.
Tim Mahon
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