Geospatial World 2004

IMGS President, Preetha Pulusani welcomed an enthusiastic crowd composed of representatives from more than 56 countries, 39 states, and one territory – apparently attendance this year was up 20% over last year’s event in New Orleans – confirming that International business travel and interest in IMGS services and solutions is on the rise.

IMGS President, Preetha Pulusani

At the welcome address relative newcomer to Intergraph, CEO Halsey Wise, enthusiastically introduced himself to many of us for the first time (Wise took the reigns as CEO July 2003). He reiterated to attendees his vision for the company and IMGS’ focus on the commercial and government technology sectors. Once again we were reminded… Intergraph is no longer a hardware company! Upbeat, motivated, and extremely confident, the youthful CEO “worked” the stage praising the company and its employees for their continued success – IMGS has just come off of their 13th consecutive profitable quarter, with the most recent setting a record for profitability. Couple this with news that the company has zero debt and is cash strong and there’s no doubt that shareholders will have something to grin about once again. Wise went on to tell us how the IMGS focus is on software and services with a focus on growth, income, and a future day without litigation.

Intergraph CEO Halsey Wise

Taking the stage back from Wise, Pulusani went on to elaborate on the company’s mission - “… the integration of geospatial data within enterprise information systems to enable business and government to make better and faster operational decisions”. Expect IMGS to accomplish this by the removal of “GIS islands of automation” brought about by the introduction and commitment to open geospatial foundation technology at the core of the information centric enterprise.

Always a crowd favorite, Pulusani gladly presented an impressive overview of just some of the company’s customers and highlighted their geospatial enterprise solutions. To give you an idea how much market penetration IMGS has, here’s just a few of the clients that were mentioned in the opening session:
- US Army Corps of Engineers
- Frankfurt Airport
- Seoul City & Gas
- Nevada DOT
- Bell
- Raytheon
- NGA
- Malaysian Dept. of Surveying and Mapping
- Canada DND
- PENNDOT
- European Union
- Korean Mapping Agency
- Military Defense UK
- Brisbane City Council
- City of Zurich
- Telefonica Spain
- Telecom Fiji
- Tennessee DOT
- And many many more!

This slide clearly reveals the IMGS solutions & target industries

In an effort to support these clients, Pulusani reminded us that the IMGS solutions are in fact just that, solutions. They are the response to the question which is typically posed to customers and potential customers… what do you need? Typically, the response is that they want shared and available data, improved access, more efficiency, better management of their assets, and informed decision making. Pulusani and IMGS responds with open standard-based technologies that enable more efficient collaboration, web access, data availability, interoperability, mobility, meta data handling, and security.

Open Solutions

IMGS offers a number of “open solutions” designed to help customers unlock their precious data. These solutions target several key industry segments including:

• Utilities & Communications
• Commercial Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry
• Military and Intelligence
• Government
• Transportation

We heard at Geospatial World 2004 that the company plans on supporting these industries with services and a number of product offerings, most notably, the GeoMedia Version 5.2 Product Suite (http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/1619/2/). Officially announced at the conference, GeoMedia 5.2 boasts some 200 new and improved functions which can be found in 17 maintenance, visualization, distribution, and analysis products. The focus of this latest release is on map composition and web publishing. In the words of David Holmes, Directory of world-wide product strategy, “we are delivering on our promise to make mapmaking as easy as possible”.
Some noteworthy highlights of 5.2:
- 100 enhancements tailored to automate map production
- auto index grid generation (very cool!)
- auto creation of map books
- improved CAD data integration
- improved performance
- “super easy” authoring with WebMap
- improved plotting and plotter support

Some other product announcements and highlights made at the conference:

GeoMedia Webmap 5.2 ws – This web authoring suite includes OGC web services, location-based web services, routing, and geocoding. The product’s strengths are fast and simple visual authoring and enhanced support for SVG. (http://imgs.intergraph.com/gmwm/)

GeoMedia Light Table – a new product design to provide the intelligence and military markets with a tool to support the visualization and analysis of situational data. The product supports slow motion roaming on large datasets to facilitate data analysis and interpretation. Features:

• Automatic smooth controlled roam of large images 
• An overview window showing the position of the ELT view on the image 
• Image comparison window providing tools for change detection 
• All of the functions of GeoMedia Image are part of the product
   (See http://imgs.intergraph.com/gimlt/)

TerraShare® is an enterprise infrastructure for geospatial data management and earth imaging production. Through the TerraShare Client, any validated user can view and access all TerraShare files within the friendly confines of the familiar Microsoft Windows File Explorer. Users may browse through TerraShare folders just as they do Windows folders. 

GeoMedia Grid 5.2 – developed by Keigan Systems, London, Ontario, Canada (www.keigansystems.com) and coming later in summer 2004, this is an extension of geoMedia for grid analysis. This release offers a number of new features and enhancements including:
- surface profiling
- volume analysis
- isoline generation
- rasterize query results
- expanded file import wizard
http://imgs.intergraph.com/ggrid/

Digital Mapping Camera (DMC) is a turnkey digital aerial camera system designed to support aerial photogrammetric missions that demand high resolution and accuracy. Z/I Imaging developed the DMC with the goal of being a direct replacement for film-based aerial mapping cameras. Designed to integrate seamlessly with existing photogrammetric worklows, the DMC provides a very cool solution to the need for high resolution imagery captured by low-altitude, high-speed flight missions. The DMC captures data in black and white, color, and Infra-red and offers users a number of benefits including better resolution, fast turnaround, less noise, and reduced material costs. For more information, check out www.3001data.com – Florida-based 3001  purchased the 3rd DCM sold by Intergraph and used the product to complete a full planimetric data capture project for Collier County, Florida. http://imgs.intergraph.com/dmc)

Always eager to share some of their customer’s success stories, Intergraph showed their appreciation for some success stories by awarding numerous customers and clients with awards. Some of the recipients of awards handed out at Geospatial World 2004 include:

100% club – honoring full digital conversion of geofacilities data
- DTE Energy and Gas
- N. Virginia Electric Cooperative
- Praugue Energy
- Rappahannock Electric Coop
- Sacramento Municipal Utility District
- The Empire District Electric Company

The 100% club!

Intergraph Cutover Club – InService customers achieving live operation of an outage or workforce management system
- Central Vermont Public Service
- DTE Energy
- Hydro Ottawa Electric
- Knoxville Utilities Board
- PECO Energy Company
- Progress Energy Florida
- Sacramento Municipal Utility District
- The Empire District Electric Company

See Part 2 of this Report

Please keep checking back as we compile several more features from Geospatial World including partner announcements and a look at some the IMGS' educational initiatives. Be sure to also check out our Image Gallery for some photos.

Some of my thoughts on the day's announcements... 

• GeoMedia 5.2 product suite delivers on its commitment to adopting open standards and the focus on output and web publishing is very apparent.
• Web publishing is a breeze (as I saw in numerous demos), the adherance to open standards and interoperability is also easily recognizable in this product suite.
• The DMC is an amazing data capture tool and will become a standard technology/tool used by local government and DOTs.
• The success of the company (IMGS) is largely due to the commitment of Intergraph product users and their commitment and praise for the solutions that they have adopted.
• CEO Halsey Wise has a youthful and energetic attitude which has been infectious amongst the IMGS staff.

The setting was spectacular but rest assured, there was also lots of business to take care of!

FYI, Geospatial World 2005 is planned for May 16-18, 2005, Los Angeles, CA - See www.geospatialworld.com