At the 2009 ESRI user conference a special PR event was held to officially announce a partnership between ITT Corp. The purpose of this event was to reveal details of an interesting product roll-out (and partnership) that will mean more image analysis within ArcGIS. The partnership is essentially to integrate their respective technologies, bringing more image analysis and image processing to ArcGIS users.

At the heart of this announcement lies a newly branded solution called ENVI EX, simply put, this is the high performance image processing and analysis solution that integrates with ArcGIS. According to ITT the real selling point to this solution is the simplicity (I.e. ease of use) and image analysis and processing functionality that his been provided which has been tailed to the GIS professional's needs.
 
We heard from ITT President, Richard Cooke about ENVI EX. The following are some of the features that users can expect to take advantage of:
 
Drag and drop UI
Portal view - allows people to preview analysis before committing the scene - this is the best feature of the feature extraction tool (was meant for Defense and intel customers initially) Takes the concept of workflows to the next level. Imagine dragging and dropping files from ENVI EX into ArcGIS!
 
Pan sharpening, classification, analysis and workflows that are targeted at the GIS user.
 
ENVI EX integrates the feature extraction functionality - comes out of the ENVI FX app
 
ArcMap composition and print map capabilities is now within the native ENVI environment.. Or export directly into ArcGIS for further analysis and workflows -- a seamless integration
 
Cooke.. "We're innovating at a very rapid pace"... as ESRI releases 9.4 with new image analysis workflows look for more reprocessing tools to come within the ArcGIS toolbox. see ENVI enterprise services, a package of analysis, reprocessing tools built on the ArcGIS platform. Coming fall of 2010. Partnerships have been struck with some 45 ESRI distributors around the globe to prepare for the release of ENVI EX

 Still wondering what all this means?? To put it in simpler terms, Image analysis is now included within ArcGIS as a result of this new partnership!
 
After the hearing from Cooke we saw a demonstration of ENVI EX
 
Demo.
- Established a Geo-link to ArcGIS from ENVI EX resulting in a live connection with ArcMap
- Ran a Supervised classification. very simple image analysis and classification with results sent directly to the geodatabase. Very fast, simple .
 
In the Q&A I asked Lauri Jordan of ESRI the following question : "As an ESRI customer, why ENVI EX and not some of the other ESRI extensions?" The team commented how ESRI has been building a platform for partners to build on. This is one of the results. Users are expecting a consistent user experience and \with ESRI providing the platform to their partners this is possible - ENVI EX is an example of this. According to Jordan, "We picked the functions that GIS users want". Of interest, I would have to expect that the partnership will result in more robust image processing capabilities down the road (ESRI will not have to reinvent the wheel) but rather, they can now leverage the experience of partners like ITT.
 
At the conclusion of the event there was some indication that down the road users can likely expect industry specific products from this partnership and solution set (for example, perhaps ENVI EX for Oil and Gas).
 
Some TOP Selling Points of ENVI EX
- Integrated in ArcGIS now
- Shipping end of August 09
- Drag and drop files between ArcGIS and ENVI EX
- Advanced high performance image manipulation
- Change detection feature extraction, classification, orthorectification
- Output to a map or directly to the geodatabase
- Create a map from an ArcGIS map template from ENVI
- Print results using the ArcGIS print dialog
- Bringing image processing results back into ArcGIS
- ENVI EX supports more than 70  file formats (like J2K, GeoTIFF) and imagery from many popular satellite and airborne sensors including panchromatic, hyper spectral, radar, thermal, LiDAR, and more.
 
Given that ENVI was present with a large team and they were proudly displaying a large 20x30 booth on the exhibition hall floor, I'd have to say that this partnership is for real.
 

See More:

Details of ENVI EX from ITT

Press release:  ITT announces a new image processing product for GIS professionals