Invention of 'image processing' technology gives computer field new marketing ammo.

Invention of `image processing' technology gives computer field new marketing ammo

Local company pursuing $400 million Army contract

A blossoming technology called image processing will open opportunities for some in the computer industry and cause others to redraw company strategies in 1991.

Some Los Angeles County companies that manufacture, market or service computer products are retraining sales forces or bidding on contracts that rely on image processing. Others say it will have only a slight effect on their operations this year.

The new technology involves putting images -- photographs, maps, drawings and the like -- into computers to be manipulated in the way numbers and language are widely handled with word processing.

Chatsworth-based Micropolis Corp. expects to redeploy its sales force to cope with demand for products that better serve image processing. The manufacturer of computer disk drives currently fields sales people in a 3-1 ratio in favor of traditional sales to computer makers. As Micropolis devotes manpower toward selling to the computer user, who is hungry for image-handling capability, the ratio will approach 1-1, predicted Micropolis Vice President of Marketing Craig Ringuette.

Computer Sciences Corp. of El Segundo is angling for a contract with the U.S. Army to harvest images of weapons blueprints and related documents. The deal is worth up to $400 million and the contract would not expire until the year 2002.

Forbes magazine trumpeted the image frontier in its Nov. 26 cover story: "DON'T DUMP YOUR COMPUTER STOCKS: Image processing will expand the market explosively in the nineties," the headline read, superimposed over a splashy pink, purple and yellow illustration.

Specifically, new peripheral equipment and software are needed to handle the vast amounts of data that define images, whose curves and colors can be a thousand times more complex than words or numbers. A new generation of printers are spitting onto paper images that contain more than 250,000 dots per square inch -- super resolution compared to today's standards of about 100,000.

"If you look at the amount of storage required for high-resolution, especially color images, it opens up a marketplace for our high-capacity products that a couple of years ago we did not anticipate," said Micropolis official Mike Anderson. "Today it's not unusual to find a single user wanting a half a gigabyte of storage, which we believe will become a gigabyte-plus in the next 12 months," he added. (A gigabyte is one billion characters of data.)

Anderson said in 1991 Micropolis will develop "parallel array" products. These would employ numerous disk drives, working in parallel fashion to collect gigabytes of information, rather than rely on central data-storage devices prone to gag on complex images.

A computer user setting up a small army of Micropolis disk drives can utilize from two to 42 disks per drive. Such parallel arrays are "a very concrete, new direction for the company," said Ringuette. "It's probably going to be the single biggest innovation in the disk drive industry."

"These complex drawings just gobble up megabytes of storage," said Robert Leff, co-chairman of Merisel Inc., a billion-dollar wholesaler. But image processing will affect markets and product selection in a minor way, he said. More importantly, 1991 will bring a greater percentage increase in sales of software than hardware, he predicted. (See related story page 19.) Currently, Merisel's sales mix is 35 percent software, 43 percent hardware and 22 percent accessories.

Buyers of image processing technology include banks that need to store receipts with signatures, police departments that want a databank of faces and fingerprints and, of course, graphic design businesses.

The L.A. office of Gensler & Associates Architects is weaving images into its designs, said Bruce Hammer, the firm's computer-aided design specialist. "We can go out to the job site with a Sony video recorder and capture the images of brick, grass, rocks, and store them. Then (the designer) can `wallpaper' the proposed building with brick, superimpose the texture on the building, without having to draw all the individual bricks," said Hammer. His firm is using image processing in design work for the $25 million Palm Springs Regional Airport renovation.

The county's largest computer company, Computer Sciences Corp., is entrenched in image processing. The $1.5 billion (revenues) firm is competing against Xerox Corp. for an Army contract that depends heavily on image processing.

The so-called Computer-Aided Acquisition and Logistics System would put purchasing data into a central storage bank. Blueprints of tanks, contracts for pistols and so on could be retrieved by certain government agencies or defense contractors on any personal computer linked up and given proper access.

Why computerize images? "Blueprints can get lost, or maybe the company went out of business" that owned the specifications, noted Jim Furlong, company spokesman. A fail-safe repository might save the Army from having to run the lengthy bid-proposal-design-award process a second time.

"This holds the promise of saving millions, if not billions, of dollars in procuring and maintaining weapons systems," said Furlong.

If the Army is happy with the system installed at 11 bases by Computer Sciences or rival Xerox, a contract with the Navy or Air Force is likely in the wings, he speculated.

Computer Sciences is also angling for a Bureau of Land Management contract to catalogue its land. "We would store images of a map and loads of data of what's under the ground, what kind of weather above, what kind of roads, etc.," said Furlong.