The Nett Warrior program commissioned a trade study a trade study of various mobile mapping solutions over the past year. The study was conducted by the Army Geospatial Center, part of the Army Corps of Engineers. They selected ATAK over others in the field, including ESRI’s CJMTK.
One thing that makes this selection particularly noteworthy is that it was selected over Nett Warrior’s own application, the Special Operations Mission Planning and Execution Office’s (SOMPE) FalconView Mobile applications and NASA’s WorldWind Mobile, which ATAK started with. Neither KilSwitch nor APASS were considered for the final analysis because they did not meet the threshold requirements for inclusion.
Specifically the report found that ATAK was tied with the most capable with ESRI, less costly, less risky to adopt and the Government had unlimited rights to the code base. This is one of numerous evaluations, but the only one that has been made publicly releaseable.
Note that the details of what app was best came down to how the scores are weighted, and they did not consider the server capability behind the app. Had they chosen the weights differently, and considered the collaboration capabilities — which will inevitably become more important to the Nett Warrior Program over time — TAK (vice just ATAK) would have scored significantly higher.
