NEC Sphere Communications announced it is collaborating with Science Applications International Corporation to deliver robust interactive unified communications capabilities as part of their service-oriented architecture (SOA) collaborative infrastructure. Leveraging the Unified Communications (UC) services with SAIC's SOA is their GeoViz product, a commercial off-the-shelf, WebCentric GeoSpatial Collaboration tool suite that provides 2-D, 3-D and 4-D views of geographic areas of interest to military, security, safety and disaster management officials.

The GeoViz tool suite provides a SOA-based, mission-oriented framework for allowing users and/or groups of users to compose their own specific mission (or user) defined operational picture (MDOP or UDOP) for subsequent collaboration and mission execution. Geospatial collaboration has become one of the hottest areas for government IT organizations seeking to provide a more complete emergency response solution using this new technology.

NEC Sphere's software is designed as a business application that fits naturally into SOA environments. Its flexibility and openness allows solution integrators to easily create applications that are tailored to customers' needs. When combined with SAIC's GeoViz collaborative framework the solution can deliver shared VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) through IP phones or soft phones, instant messaging and on-demand conferencing to different users across multiple domains. The result is rich collaboration among first responders and other emergency personnel that helps to assure emergency resources are deployed efficiently. A very complex technical problem of integrating rich media content is addressed for the first time in a manner that allows users to easily define their own need-based content, including voice communication for timely responses in mission critical situations.

With GeoViz and NEC Sphere integration, users at various echelons can view and annotate geospatial content of their interest while maintaining voice communication among collaborating communities of interest. The users achieve dynamic collaboration of geospatial data representations within a Web-centric presentation environment. The tool is fully integrated with a SOA providing visualization services in a Web browser environment with a common graphical user interface allowing simple point-and-click operations. A user can connect to and share disparate technologies and systems through an industry-standard Web architecture.

NEC Sphere software is architected as a distributed software application with rich unified communications services that are opened up to easily participate in SOAs.