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From The Floor - "People make the difference"
People make the difference is one of the conference track topics at this years show. It also
sets the tone for what I’ve experienced here at GITA XXIV this week. Working in the
dot-com world, I exchange emails with hundreds of people every day. Occasionally I get
a phone call, but I find that I often crave that face-to-face contact so crucial in the
business process. This week I managed to meet with a number of people that definitely
make a difference to many of us involved in geospatial and location-based technologies.
Even though it was 7:00 PM and we had all been on our feet for hours, Frank
Castleberry, VP Sales, Byers SpatialAge® Solutions, was eager to sit me down and have
a one on one. The SpatialAge Solutions division has a number of software solutions,
however, Castleberry tells me that a considerable amount of business is generated by the
company’s proven data conversion methods, helping to provide clients with total
solutions. Castleberry’s crew is showcasing the Spatial Data Loader, a tool set designed
to interact with all kinds of databases and pull data from your AM/FM/GIS and publish it
in a geospatially enabled data warehouse. Byers is building on a number of business
relationships including a recently announced implementation of GIS-based technology
and software to provide Sprint with assistance in the growth of their DSL service. The
company also recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of their partnership with
Telcordia.
Tuesday morning was my chance to meet with the crew from Autodesk. Kim Davis,
Director of Marketing and Communications with the GIS Division set the tone by making
sure I understood that Autodesk offers much more than “out of the box software
solutions.” Sure the company is perhaps still best know for their “boxed” products,
however, Davis firmly commits that the GIS Division is “focused on delivering complete
solutions.” Services are a key business component, and the company has a number of
global business partners to help clients solve their business problems, not just GIS
problems. My discussion with Davis ended with a brief look at Autodesk® Design Server
in action. The cornerstone of the company’s enterprise GIS strategy, Design Server is
tightly integrated with AutoCAD Map, Autodesk MapGuide, and Autodesk OnSite.
Using standard open protocols, Design Sever reduces typical problems by centralizing
location data into a single Oracle® database. More than 4 million design professionals
use Autodesk products in more than 150 countries.
My next “people encounter” was with Roger Coupland, President of Intergraph’s Utility
& Communications division. Coupland reinforced the division and commitment of the
company to it’s 5 vertical business units and briefly discussed IPS Inc., a wholly owned
subsidiary with more than 1,000 employees located worldwide. Another tidbit Coupland
shared was that the company will be introducing a new thin client - G/NetViewer - and
we should hear more about this in the near future.
A logical stop after visiting with Coupland was a one-on-one with Milan Usal, Manager,
Operations & Marketing with IntelliWhere™. For those of you who don’t know this,
IntelliWhere is a new division of Intergraph Corporation’s Mapping and GIS vertical
business unit. Created in December 2000, the focus of Intelliwhere is on the rapidly
growing location-based technology and services. Usal pulled out an Ericsson R380 WAP
enabled mobile phone and gave me a “work force scenario” demo of Intelliwhere Genie -
the division’s core product. Intelliwhere Genie combines wireless messaging, mobile
Internet, and full web based technologies with LBS and supports SMS, WAP, PDA, I-
mode, Java, and HTML/XML client delivery. Using his phone, Usal showed how easily a
mobile unit could receive a message via SMS messaging, enabling a work crew to
quickly act on a new work order. Using his Ericsson phone, Usal brought up details of the
hypothetical work order, including a map, photo, technical drawing, and details (data
attributes). Once all the necessary work and updates were made on the data, the work
order status could be transmitted and updated. Very cool… and its also content, device
and data independent.
Finally, Jim Dielschneider of LizardTech gave me a great look at some very cool data
compression products. Jim brought up a 430 MB scanned nautical chart and then
displayed the same image served up on the Internet in MrSID format. It was now only
767 Kb after being compressed with DjVu Solo 3.1! It’s not difficult to tell why so many
companies are choosing LizardTech products to compress and view imagery on the web.
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