Small Slovenian Firm Develops NASA Software
A small software company from the industrial town of Trbovlje, some 50 km east of Ljubljana, has proved that even a small firm in a relatively remote place can score an important international contract, helping develop NASA's new data transmission software.
Dewesoft's team of 12 young experts started working on the project together with Austrian measuring instruments maker Dewetron in 2003, three years before the two were commissioned to help develop new Shuttle monitoring systems for the US space agency.
Dewesoft director Andrej Orozen said that the project was a great achievement, proving Slovenia's technological resolve. He is very proud that Dewesoft's entire team was educated in Slovenia.
The new software enables real-time data transmission from space and detects automatically if the signal from a Shuttle is lost.
The team also met NASA's request to display results not from left to right, but from top to bottom, as the space agency's engineers have grown used to this from their previous system involving print outs.
Dewesoft technical manager Jure Knez said that the system developed together with Dewetron involves 25 measuring devices, which receive up to 3,000 parameters of data from 20,000 km away.
NASA tested Dewesoft's software for six months before putting into operation in the summer of 2007.
Knez said that NASA is not only using Dewesoft's software for their Space Shuttle programme, but on all of its flights. The contract with NASA was worth about US$1m.
The company was quite surprised when NASA chose Dewesoft and Dewetron for the contract, Orozen said. He added that this showed that nowadays results are the only thing that matter and that coming from a small town was no excuse not to succeed.
Dewesoft was founded eight years ago and topped EUR 1.4m in sales revenues in 2007. Dewesoft also works with other reputable organisations, such as Audi, BMW, Ferrari, Bosch, Siemens, Philips, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Honeywell.
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