This April, ASTi celebrates 25 years of providing industry-leading sound & radio simulation and large network voice communications systems to military and commercial customers throughout the United States and 46 other countries around the world. The company that began as three friends crafting simulator subsystems in an Old Town Alexandria, VA apartment in 1989 has steadily grown over the past quarter century into a vanguard of simulation innovation with more than 40 dedicated developers, engineers, and support staff operating out of its Herndon, VA headquarters.
For 25 years, ASTi has delivered products and services that enhance critical training and experimentation programs for an impressive list of military and civilian programs. Our solutions range from subsystems integrated into the world’s most sophisticated flight simulators, to large-scale network communications systems, to elegant software plug-ins that extend the capabilities of serious games.
The evolution of ASTi's products and solutions is testament to the company's agility and marketplace intuition. Early systems ran closed, embedded DOS-based programs on proprietary hardware to route audio through custom hardware DSPs to up to eight positions. ASTi's current Linux-based products can be virtualized to run "in the cloud", offer customization via an open, fully RESTful API, and can scale to support hundreds of operators.
But our product evolution tells only half of our story so far. Without doubt, ASTi continues to thrive by adhering to our core philosophy of unwavering business ethics in support of our customers' success. We strive to establish long, mutually-beneficial partnerships with our customers, and aspire to instill unshakable confidence that ASTi will always do our best to help them achieve their own goals.
"I have successfully used ASTi products since 1995," said Dwayne Reynolds of Northrop Grumman Information Systems. "These are dynamic tools that have allowed me to design specialized communication infrastructure for my customers' unique requirements. When I was not able to provide a solution using the base product, ASTi teamed with me to create a design that not only performed beyond our expectations, but was also deployable multiple times at a value well within our budget.
"I do not view ASTi as a vendor but as an extension of my own team. That's easy to do when dealing with the same faces over the course of 19 years. Job well done and congratulations for 25 years!"
Our longevity and committment are also demonstrated by the fact that all the original founders are still active in the day-to-day operations of ASTi. Further, the average tenure for an ASTi application engineer is about 12 years. ASTi, however, refuses to become complacent, as the company is older than many of its new employees.
"When we started 25 years ago, we obviously wanted to create a financially successful business. But more importantly, we wanted to create an environment in which the people were understood, and regarded as our most important asset," said Patrick Gaffney, ASTi's President. "Our goal was to create a company where the employees truly enjoyed coming to work, and each and every one of them understood their impact on the company's success. We take great pride in being able to realize this goal over the past 25 years, and are honored to be acknowledged as one of Washington's "50 Great Places to Work" by Washingtonian magazine in 2013. All in all, we are very proud of the past 25 years, and look forward to our continued industry leadership in technological innovation, product support and workplace culture."
