Geospatial World 2005 reporting by GIS Development

Dear Readers,

“Do we live in a world of GIS or a geospatial world?”

That was a pretty innovative and smart starting note by Preetha Pulusani (President of Intergraph Mapping and Geospatial Solution) for the big-sized user conference of Intergraph – the ‘Geospatial World 2005’! While the brand ‘Geospatial World’ as a conference couldn’t simply be ignored in the statement, the genuine intent of the query was also quite clear. It has been for some time that Intergraph was corroborating the fact that we need to come out of islands of GIS and have a wider, broader and more open view and has been aptly exemplifying that with finesse. This year, perhaps once again, Intergraph is proving its huge popularity, customer loyalty and satisfaction with a very successful opening on the first Day of the 3-day conference.

GIS Development strives again to foster the growth and sharing of important happenings in the world of GIS and related technologies. In this effort it brings you a live update of the Geospatial World 2005 conference as it unfolds in San Francisco. Find following a brief update of the conference to be presented in two parts.

Geospatial World 2005, is the annual gathering of the Intergraph Geospatial users community sponsored by Intergraph Mapping and Geospatial Solutions and is the fifth major conference being held since its start in 2000. This year the conference boasts of about 1000 registered participants, 12 exhibitors with over 180 speakers.

Regards,
Ayon Tarafdar
Senior Assistant Editor, GIS Development
ayon@gisdevelopment.net

Keynote Address – Halsey Wise

The Inaugural Keynote Session started off with Halsey Wise, President and CEO, Intergraph Corporation presenting a brief but impacting opening speech. In general, he spoke on 4 main areas - Intergraph Corporation in brief, a brief description of the main divisions, the vision of the organization and the performance of Intergraph in the last year. His key tag line was quite inspiring where he mentioned the philosophy of ‘Now – Next – What after next?’ The key points his speech touched upon are -

‘Now – Next – What after next?’

Halsey mentioned the growth of Intergraph over the years and specifically the last 12 months thereby pointing out that ‘now’ it is in a prime health. He emphasized the need for understanding and capitalizing on the areas of potential within the company and working on the strengths rather than everything as the ‘next’ path of future. He mentioned that the revenue of Intergraph in 2004 has been to the tune of 551 million USD. The operating income of the company has risen by over 100% and the gross margins are at around 50% for 2004. He mentioned that the future geospatial markets is to be huge and prospective. He spoke of carving out niche areas in the governance, defense, and enterprise sectors of our society as the long-term directive.

‘The three-pronged corporate strategy’

Halsey mentioned that there are three key strategies of Intergraph, which shall lead it to being the more customer focused and relevant to our daily lives. Firstly, it needs to reduce costs. Secondly, it has to improve its processes and finally it has to bring value to its customers in each and every thing they do or produce. He talked of the relationship between data and an organization and its criticality. He mentioned that Intergraph is now in one of its best financial position and is best equipped to invest into ventures that are futuristic, relevant and bring consolidation to its activities.

'You talked. We listened. We designed'.

He mentioned that in the past (as well as now), Intergraph had a philosophy to listening to the various customer needs and then developing services that suit to those needs. He mentioned that inspite of their standard products, they shall continue to make tailor-made solutions to enable societies and businesses run smoothly and effectively.

Keynote Address – Preetha Pulusani

'Enabling seamless geospatial computing'

Preetha Pulusani, President, Intergraph Mapping and Geospatial Solutions, spoke eloquently about the positioning of the company and gave a clear vision of what the industry is moving towards and how Intergraph is gearing up for the future. Her forward-looking speech gave quite promising glimpses of the future of this discipline. She mentioned that ‘seamless geospatial computing’ is the future for Intergraph and the industry. In the coming days, the role of geospatial applications shall need to be real-time, openly networked and uninterrupted. Hence we have to start devising strategies that can constantly update and integrate with multiple platforms. Other issues were also touched upon. She also emphasized the need to bring out GIS from its boxes and start thinking of it as mainstream and an integral part of any processes that tries to visualize complex interrelationships of data or information with a specific purpose of generating intelligence.

Preetha then took her presentation all over the globe, in her style, picking up cases of Intergraph’s work in enabling solutions of complex situations. She spoke of cases from Italy, China, US Army, Polish Army, Netherlands, and many more.

She emphasized upon the importance of industry standards and mentioned. Asserting the healthy position of the organization, the investor’s confidence and the potential, she pointed out the transition of Intergraph from being a vendor of proprietary GIS to an organization of open solutions.

Keynote – Dave Holmes, Art Spencer and Umit Basoglu

Post tea and just before the lunch, there was a keynote session termed – Enabling the Spatial Enterprise with Intergraph Geospatial Solutions. The session had three interlinked and well coordinated speeches that captivated the hall in a unique style of presentation with multimedia and GIS visuals. The session summed up the position of Intergraph in the geospatial domain in terms of its services, products and updates of the last year.

Dr Art Spencer, spoke at length heavily emphasising on the three key corporate strategies of Intergraph and the role of geospatial sciences in relation to these. He spoke of how the strategies of – minimizing cost, increasing productivity and improving processes had their bearings on product development and product policies. He showed some amazing examples on screen, of how Intergraph products tackle a water supply pipe burst in a busy locality and help coordinate between agencies to report the event and then issue work orders and finally get it attended. Another classic example was of how a busy traffic jammed highway was reported and subsequently alternative re-routing of traffic was implemented within minutes through the geospatial platform support.

Dr Umit Basoglu spoke on geospatial intelligence and its applications to data gathering and monitoring and its use in times of emergency. He spoke around the fact that operational costs are sensitive to the demands of the enterprise. He mentioned the importance to have a goal that is demand driven.

David D. Holmes, director of worldwide product strategy at Intergraph, mentioned in brief about the product ranges available and the ones awaiting release in near future. He gave a firm picture of the application areas where the products find right use. He also showcased the Return on Investments factor on geospatial initiation in any organization. He gave an example of a sample RoI, with and without enterprise image management. He also touched upon various demonstrations of GIS systems, Image Processing, LBS, Utility application, etc mentioning the various situations of RoIs.

After this session was the lunch followed by the opening of the technical sessions.

Technical Sessions

The post lunch technical sessions took place in 16 different halls spanning primarily 7 different application areas of Foundation, Government Solutions, Utilities and Communications Industries Solutions, Military and Intelligence Solutions, Transportation Industry Solutions, Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Solutions and Really Neat Stuff(!!!).

Press meets and interviews

The post lunch session also allowed press personnel to have direct one to one discussions with the management of Intergraph as well as technical resource personnel.