2005 December 22 Contents Editor's Introduction Industry Survey / Part Two GIS for Business: Neoris and IDV Solutions

This issue sponsored by ESRI

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Editor's Introduction

This week I bring you a second batch of answers to my informal industry survey and I report on two companies that help other companies and public agencies make better use of their geographic data. Plus, my usual roundup of news from press releases.

Next week GIS Monitor will be on vacation... as will most of you. Happy Holidays!

— Matteo

1. What is your niche in the geospatial industry?


2. What was the single biggest technological development in your niche this year?


3. What was the single biggest business development in your niche this year?


4. What technological or business development would make your company more profitable next year? [Alternative wording, for public agencies: "What technological or business development would make your agency's work more cost-effective next year?"]

1. Large-scale, detailed engineering-grade photogrammetry


2. Relatively status quo


3. More available funding of projects in the public works sector


4. Getting certain government agencies to pay their invoices faster

1. I am in the (global and national) Spatial Data Infrastructure niche


2. Geospatial profile for enterprise architecture


3. Creation of a map server foundation and Autodesk participation in the open source environment


4. Geospatial profile for enterprise architecture

1. We build the largest and most extensively used geospatial software platform. While its core focus is on generic GIS functionality, it is applied in virtually all applications. This characteristic facilitates integration of many types of geographic knowledge. The product implementation of this software is in the form of desktop, server, and mobile solutions, as well as an intelligent geodatabase environment. These products are open, interoperable, and embeddable. While our focus has been on generic technology, we have literally thousands of partners who have customized this platform into unique industry applications.
        Our platform represents a complete system. Our users often buy it because it performs the full set of tasks they need: authoring data, data management, modeling, spatial analysis, mapping and visualization, and serving and accessing data in the field. While we call our system a geographic information system that supports individual geospatial workflows, in the Web services environment it is rapidly being deployed to geospatially enable most other enterprise business workflows.


2. ArcGIS Server 9.1. This is a complete GIS implemented in a server environment. It supports many levels of GIS implementation including departmental servers, enterprise systems, and even multi-organizational systems. We are beginning to think of the latter as a GeoWeb, which is a distributed network of GIS services that describe many aspects of geography and workflows.
        Beyond its basic capabilities, we envision that ArcGIS Server will be a key building block to support the vision of a "system of systems" that will be used for a range of applications and purposes, supporting regional, national, and even global applications. This framework already supports map and data publishing, metadata cataloging, and the discovery of geospatial services. Over time, it will expand to support the dynamic collection of a whole host of distributed GIS services, including data management, modeling, GIS analysis, and advanced visualization. It will provide a platform for us to look at bigger problems that depend on cross-organization and cross-discipline collaboration.


3. ESRI launched the ESRI Developer Network (EDN), which provides a new business model for developers to get the software and resources they need to build spatially-aware applications. An EDN subscription enables developers to license ESRI software exclusively for development and testing. They are supported by the EDN website, which is a forum for ESRI development teams to share information such as code samples, technical articles, and e-mail alerts. It also provides user forums for developers to communicate with one another. In 2006, ESRI will hold its first Developer Summit, a 2-day conference open to anyone.


4. It's difficult to say. ESRI will be releasing ArcGIS 9.2, which is a major introduction of new functionality and server-based architecture. Included will be better cartography, data management, modeling, temporal GIS, and new tools for accessing GIS functionality across the Web. Also, ESRI will introduce the Image Server, which will provide on-the-fly image processing by simultaneously processing and distributing images in a Web services environment. ArcGIS Explorer will be a new Web client that is free, and promises to support a new way for GIS users to share and access GIS services of all types.

1. Geomatic Technologies is a leader in the provision of spatially-based business solutions, information products, and services. Our range of customers includes utilities, government, telecommunications, and other commercial enterprises. Services include: aerial photography orthorectification, spatial application development, spatial database hosting and Web service provision, road and rail asset inspection systems, and utility field asset inspection systems.


2. The release of the Spatial Smart Tag technology provides access within Microsoft Word or Excel to a hosted smart address searching engine that scans definitive government address databases to locate verified addresses. Once located, the system can return additional address information and high quality map and photography images to any application with access to the Internet.


3. There are two: one at the start of the year and one at the end. First, Google Earth for providing a rich photographic data set within an interface and access model that encouraged people outside the industry to try it out. Finally, people in our industry had their friends and colleagues say, �So this is what you do.� Second, Autodesk�s release of MapServer Enterprise into the public domain will be seen as a tipping point in the development of the geospatial software industry. This canny move provides the industry with the attention and resources of the only software company with a geospatial interest in the BusinessWeek Top 50 performers list.


4. The continuous improvement and enhancement of data sets accessible through applications and services like Google Earth will drive the market for commercial services, which are Geomatic Technologies� specialties. When customers realize the value of combining their customer and asset databases with commercial geospatial datasets, we can truly say that our industry has �gone mainstream�.

1. GDR is a GIS data and services provider that offers custom-built GIS data for private and public organizations. Organizations from police, fire, and EMS departments to telecommunications, real estate, insurance, and utility companies use GDR data in their GIS applications to help save lives or increase business. GDR leverages its archive of U.S. parcels, satellite, and aerial imagery, tax assessor information, and a host of other location-based datasets to provide custom-built street networks and address points, combined with industry-specific data in a singular map file. GDR offers an "a la carte" service for GIS data and a variety of delivery options that are customized for each organization's needs.


2. N/A


3. There were several consolidations and acquisitions in the public safety software space where GDR deploys the Geofile Services solutions. The most recent was the merger of CML and Plant Equipment which has created a company with 60 percent market share in the E-911 call processing and mapping technology space for the public safety industry.


4. GDR has built and will leverage in greater importance our GeoServices Engine (GSE), a set of GIS scripting algorithms built by GDR that query a customer's GIS on more than 30 parameters to check for errors, consistency, and quality, to enable the greatest amount of accuracy and fastest delivery of GIS datasets unavailable in off-the-shelf maps. This software tool allows GDR to deliver products cheaper, faster, and with greater quality by a significant factor than before.

1. Mobile mapping (on laptop and handheld devices), with an emphasis on applications for utility transmission and distribution such as network analysis (loop makeup, valve isolation, outage analysis), data collection and inventory, AVL, lightning strike monitoring, and much more.


2. The growing proliferation of reliable wireless communication in the mobile environment. More powerful handheld devices. GPS proliferation (almost commonplace now).


3. Continued robust growth. For the last three years, our software revenue has grown at a rate of slightly over 100 percent per year. Being a modest guy, I expect our niche did about the same.


4. The greatest impact on our company next year would be for utility companies to recognize the surpassing value that mobile mapping provides. Placing geospatial data in the hands of the people who work outside the office provides a terrific ROI. When you integrate their additions with the geospatial core, the ROI rises further. When you have workhorse applications running on such affordable platforms, the benefits grow so much that the formulas for measuring ROI look like they were made for a different universe. The game changes. I believe dozens of utility companies have come to this realization, and as they and the rest fully exploit the possibilities for efficiency gains, our business will grow even more dramatically.

1. Our niche market is the small and medium sized "value conscious" land surveying and civil engineering firms that are looking for surveying solutions.


2. The continuing proliferation of GPS technology.


3. The business seemed rather static this year — no Earth-shattering changes competitively. What we have noticed is how busy our land surveyors and civil engineering customers are -- the traditional "fall slow down" in business hasn't occurred.

1. NavtechGPS has been providing top level GPS and GPS-related technical courses, software, publications, and hardware — both end component and OEM — to the professional GPS/GNSS community since 1984.


2. NavtechGPS's biggest technical contribution was to continue to strengthen our existing technical courses and to introduce new courses to keep up with the constantly evolving needs of manufacturers and users in the GPS/GNSS community. NavtechGPS is also constantly representing new manufacturers and GPS/GNSS equipment.


3. Introduction of new GPS/GNSS courses and equipment. NavtechGPS now carries three lines of Galileo user equipment available today.


4. NavtechGPS would benefit by the continuing developments and improvements by other companies with GNSS and hardware.

1. We provide wide area differential GPS correction services for high accuracy positioning during the data acquisition phase.


2. The introduction of an additional very high accuracy decimeter global service — OmniSTAR XP


3. Introduction of new OmniSTAR-capable receivers by Trimble, Topcon, etc.


4. Increased choices of OmniSTAR XP- and HP-capable hardware from the GPS manufacturers.

1. Open Spatial provides solutions for utilities and government that integrate both CAD and GIS into a central open database.


2. Improvements in Oracle Spatial and the widespread acceptance of using a central open database for storing all spatial information.


3. The rapid adoption of the Munsys solution for public works, local government, and utility organizations in the North American market.


4. The continued acceptance of Open GIS standards and central data storage, allowing multiple users and applications to share the same data and thereby bridging the gap between CAD and GIS.

1. Airborne LiDAR bathymetry


2. Use of Optech SHOALS — Airborne LiDAR Bathymeter for river surveys that cover the collection of topographic elevations and hydrographic depths for the purpose of modeling the shape and slope of the river system, including the flood plane. The very shallow, often turbid water required the development of algorithms to obtain water depth measurements. The development of these base algorithms was the single biggest technological development for near-shore marine surveying.


3. The acceptance and delivery of a SHOALS 1000T to Fugro-Pelagos as the first commercial company to offer LiDAR bathymetry services using an Optech SHOALS system.


4. An increased demand for river bottom and near-shore bathymetry data for erosion and environmental monitoring that will lead to the recognition by the GIS industry of the near-shore as an extension of the on-shore topography.

1. Optech Incorporated is the global market leader in LiDAR technology in myriad applications. Optech's core technology LiDAR products are used in aerial survey applications using our Airborne Laser Terrain Mapping (ALTM) systems, along coastlines using our SHOALS family of products, on land via our ILRIS 3D and ILRIS 36D product lines, underground with products such as Optech's Cavity Monitoring System (CMS), and in space on such projects as the Phoenix mission to Mars.


2. Optech has made strides in many diverse technologies this year and it's hard to pinpoint that progress to a single breakthrough. One of the areas where we have maintained a substantial edge over our competition is in the fact that our Airborne Laser Terrain Mapping systems (ALTM's) continue to contain the only true programmable sensor in the airborne terrain marketplace.


3. Our business activity is dominated by the ALTM LiDAR market. We have recently seen an astonishing increase in our rate of sales (seven ALTM 3100's in the last 30 days). We attribute this success to our continuous product improvement and development efforts. Specifically, we have been focusing our development activity on point accuracy for the last few years and can now deliver 5-8 centimeter elevation accuracy from most operating altitudes (to 3 kilometer AGL). Of course we have continued to provide the most flexible and programmable sensor in this industry and we are redoubling our efforts in customer support with the transition to a 24/7 technical support hotline.


4. At Optech we know that profit results from doing things right, the first time. For over 30 years in the LiDAR business we have not made decisions based on profit, but rather, we continue to base every action on the value delivered to our customers. We know that if we leverage the knowledge and experience we have gained in our many LiDAR markets to deliver ever increasing value to our customers, the profit will come by itself. Therefore, we continuously improve our products by investing over 20 percent of our revenue in R&D.;

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