How Do You Support Software Systems When There is No "End of Life" Option?

Software and hardware upgrades are an expected and integral part of software product lifecycle management – unless you’re developing for a military platform. Typically, military projects take several years to develop, and logistics and support contracts can span decades. This problem is even more acute in the case of integrated systems for naval vessels, where hardware systems can only be updated during a refit, when the vessel is taken out of service.

At Kongsberg Geospatial, the TerraLens product team doesn’t believe in End-Of-Life for software products. We can’t – our geospatial Software Development Kit (SDK) is used in mission critical systems internationally, and has been in continuous service for over 25 years.

While support teams for software products typically focus only on supporting the current version of their products, we focus on the entire installed history of our product ecosystem.

Our product team is actively supporting over a decade’s worth of versions of our SDK from InterMAPhics 5.2 through to our latest TerraLens 9.2 build for multiple Linux and Windows architectures and compilers. We maintain build configurations, regression test baselines, and test hardware to support our customers for as long as they need us.

Our TerraLens support team works with our customers as they strategically manage upgrades – to newer hardware; new system configurations, and new functionality. We regularly update our SDK to support the latest operating systems - such as RedHat8, and development environments, like Windows VisualStudio2019.

Our product maintains API compatibility, even as new feature requirements continually evolve the product to leverage the power of modern GPUs and multi-core CPUs.

By engineering a graphical toolkit tuned to be performant on configurations ranging from RISC ARM processors with OpenGL-ES, to powerful multi-core desktop systems with gaming-quality GPUs, we ensure we have fully-supported product streams that meet our customers’ needs.

TerraLens is an operating system / IDE-agnostic geospatial Software Development Kit that has been optimized for high performance real-time applications.

If you are developing an application requiring a real-time mapping or geospatial component, you can learn more about TerraLens at the link above, or contact us for more information about our developer support programs and services.