Part 1: What a difference a year makes – our defence journey so far
In a recent article from Military Technology magazine, we were called the ‘go-to-company’ for future training options in the defence sector. This is an amazing reference and is testament to the quality and effort of our people in achieving this status in less than a year. How did we accomplish so much in such a short space of time? This series of blogs leading up to our attendance at this year’s I/ITSEC will trace our journey and track our trajectory to answer that very question. Read on to find out more.
How it all began
Back in 2019, we were a plucky, young startup, and by definition, a technology company fueled with a vision to bring positive change to the world by leveraging compute power to help solve big problems. That’s our sector because we have the talent, passion and expertise to be extremely successful in the tech space. We had built a powerful, dynamically scaling computing platform also known as the Hadean Platform. We knew the potential and opportunities it could offer enterprise would be incalculably huge. With so much capability available, and, as a startup filled with big dreams, high hopes and gamers we thought: let’s see the products flex their muscles in the gaming world as we drive the change to make gaming more interactive, immersive and imaginative.
Breaking records and taking names
This is why we were in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference back in March 2019. Our core capabilities had caught the eye of CCP Games and we were there to help them break another world record for the highest number of concurrent players with their EVE Online MMO. The attempt, which saw over 14,000 spaceships and more than 10,000 concurrent combatants from 121 countries join the fray, drew a lot of attention at GDC with personnel representing the US Army, who were also at the conference, coming over to check out the demo. They were intrigued with the simulation function and wanted to understand whether it could be applied to their industry. Our response was a resounding yes, because our technology is agnostic and interops with third party COTS solutions, AI libraries and game engines. That was really the beginning of the conversations that we started to have with the defence sector. A synergistic spark occurred as they were attracted to the type of solutions we were providing to problems in gaming. It quickly became clear that our technology was a fit for multiple use cases across a myriad of industries, and it was exciting to see how our expertise could be used to support projects within the world of defence.
Not long after GDC we were invited to partner with Microsoft to help build a prototype for wargaming as the US Marine Corps were interested in migrating the exercise onto a digital platform. The same technology we were using for a Minecraft project could be applied to this collaboration as well, for us, this was a really satisfying achievement.
Following on from this we were approached by and began working with CAE on a project to build out a single synthetic environment that replicated a full scale city and pattern of life behaviour. It was through this collaboration that we attended our first I/ITSEC in 2021.
Newbies at the conference
It was our premiere attendance at the world’s largest modelling, simulation and training event and what did we have to show for it? Well, quite a lot is the answer. We were there to formally announce our presence in the defence space. Historically, defence clients had accumulated a library of products and software that they were using for training, planning and various other programmes — the issue was that the programmes were siloed and none of them could interact with the others or sit together on the same platform to enable more convenient access. A significant amount of investment had already been made in these systems and the question being asked was whether there was a way to have them all interoperate effectively; it turned out that our solutions could provide the ideal lynchpin.
Key takeaways from I/ITSEC 2021
The demonstration that we showed in partnership with CAE, as well as our hypothesis on how we could help people fit their solutions together, was very well received. Our technology is extensible and agnostic, and as a result of this, it can work with a variety of simulation engines, data libraries and operating environments. It can also be utilised by a vast range of ecosystems. At the end of the conference we wrote:
As a whole, the event showed the vast digital transformation occurring within defence. Enterprise technology, gaming, as well as the traditional defence companies are aligning more due to the opportunities that Web 3.0 and spatial computing offer. These technologies are enabling more immersive environments, data-driven strategic thinking and the merging of siloed training and analysis systems. Moving forward, we’re excited to see the role our platform plays in providing the scalable compute power needed for these data hungry applications.
What have we been up to since then?
It really has been quite a ride since the previous show. The solutions we were offering in terms of combining previously siloed training and analysis systems, providing real-time data to support decision making and strategic thinking as well as the enablement of immersive training environments were so well received that off the back of our attendance we came to the attention of several operators within the defence industry. Here’s a little run down of just a few of our incredible partners, and projects we’ve been working on to date:
System Integrators
CAE: Building out a city-scale environment capable of hosting over two million continuously active AI entities including humans, ground and aerial vehicles.
BAE: Enabling complex collective training solutions within a secure environment. Hadean’s Platform parallelised simulations to accelerate scenario analysis, and allocated computing power dynamically to wherever it was most needed within the simulation.
Defence Technology Partners
Cervus: Working in partnership with Cervus’ AI analytics engine, The Hive, Hadean provided the computational power to develop and test innovative solutions to create a more rapid and agile decision cycle and enhanced decision support process.
Thales & Plexsys: Providing the digital backbone to support scalable, high-fidelity training that builds next generation capabilities for cross-domain collaboration, gathering and utilising data intelligence and the efficient leveraging of synthetic environments.
Government clients – British Army
MoD: Selected to support the British Army’s Collective Training Transformation Programme with the prime aim of combining live data feeds into a single immersive simulation… you’ll have to keep an eye out for our exciting announcement during the conference to find out more about this!
Looking ahead to I/ITSEC 2022
In that space of time we have more than doubled our contribution to the defence landscape through our multiple collaborations and become well established and trusted partners with major players in the sector along with the UK’s MoD itself. We are thrilled to be attending I/ITSEC 2022 once again, we can’t wait to share further details of what we have accomplished with our partners and we look forward to making new and exciting collaborations.