Q What are the key challenges in the utility sector where Autodesk products may provide solutions?

A The 2005 GITA Technology Review reports that field force automation was among the top three applications for the electric, gas, and water industries. A plausible explanation for the critical importance of field force automation for utilities is the aging workforce. At a recent Autodesk Eastern Utility Forum one of the critical areas that was identified by participants, which included power, gas, and railroad companies, is the aging workforce. This is a bigger problem for utilities than for other industries.

But in my opinion the solution for this is ultimately going to involve IT. The key is what I would call intelligent desktop solutions. Intelligent solutions like these help younger workers be productive, but without the necessity of years of on the job training to acquire the knowledge that more experienced workers have absorbed through many years of experience. These systems integrate the production of a construction drawing, engineering analysis, and generation of a bill of materials and job estimates in a single, accessible package. In the context of the aging workforce problem that utilities are facing, the critical benefit for the future is that with basic AutoCAD skills a relatively inexperienced person can efficiently perform the design, engineering, and financial estimating tasks that are required to complete a work order. The key business benefit is improved quality of service to the customer.

Another commonly faced hurdle is the "as-built problem". This problem is often the result of having different teams responsible for engineering design and maintaining as-builts or records. The engineering design folks typically use a CAD tool to design network infrastructure. The records folks use a traditional GIS application to maintain a record of the network infrastructure after it is constructed. The problem arises because almost invariably the engineering design deliverable is a piece of paper called a construction drawing. (It is actually paradoxical that the engineering design team uses sophisticated digital design tools, but the end result is a very old-fashioned piece of paper.) The construction drawing is used by the construction contractor to build the network infrastructure. After construction is complete, the construction drawing comes back to the records team as a piece of paper called an "as-built", which may have been marked up or red-lined because the contractor may have had to make minor changes to the original design. A member of the records staff digitizes the as-built into the records database. At most organizations there is a backlog of as-builts waiting to be entered into the records database, and the backlog can stretch anywhere from 45 days to several years.

Yet another problem is the field problem, which involves the business process by which facilities information is passed to the personnel in the field and updated information from the field flows back to the records team. Utilities and telcos have a lot of people in the field. They are sometimes called install and repair staff, troublemen or linesmen, or field maintenance staff. They are usually customer-facing. In fact in many cases, they may be the only people you meet face to face from your local utility or telco. The fascinating thing is that the field staff usually know more about the location, detailed properties, and condition of network infrastructure than anyone else in the organization because they work with it daily. Not only that, but the field staff need accurate, reliable data to be productive. An interesting statistic that many utilities and telcos capture is "returns", which is the proportion of work orders that require one or more return visits. For many utilities and telcos returns amount to between 25 and 30% of all install and repair jobs. This is expensive and it means that instead of a crew completing on average 5 work orders per day, they are only able to complete 4 work orders.

Q What are the challenges of the utility and telecom sector in the Middle East and South East Asian region?

A In addition to the common problems I have outlined that all utilities and telecoms face, there are problems specific to Middle East and South East Asia and other rapidly developing areas. In some jurisdictions, build-out is occurring at such a rapid rate that as-builts are hopelessly backlogged and or not captured at all. This means that there is no effective record of where underground facilities are located. Because in many areas, there is so much construction going on at such a rapid rate, there is a high risk of cables and pipes being dug up. This can be dangerous as well as expensive. Secondly, in some areas regulation may be ineffective, so that utilities and telcos do not feel a real need to capture information about the location of their facilities. In the long run this is expensive because field staff do not have the information they need before going out to a problem site. Secondly it can be dangerous. Thirdly, it results in a lower standard of quality of service. Good facilities data is necessary to maintain high standards of service, ensure safety, and support efficient operation.

Q What is the solution for this problem of correct management of field information?

A I would like to describe a practical solution to these problems, specifically what Brad Lawrence of ENMAX Power Corp has done, because he has been a leader in first recognizing these problems and secondly in implementing a practical solution. Quite a few years ago the City of Calgary, which is in western Canada and has a population of around 800,000, in a very forward looking bylaw required all utilities and telecoms within the city to submit data showing the location of their network infrastructure to a consortium call JUMP, Joint Utility Mapping Project. The actual data format required was DGN files, which tells you how long ago this was. What this meant for ENMAX was that they had to create digital information showing the location of their network infrastructure, conductors, transformers, poles, and other equipment. In a very forward looking decision, they decided to store all of the digital information including location in an Oracle RDBMS (relational database management system), which means that right from the beginning they had the concept of a centralized network infrastructure data store. This made things much easier for them later.

ENMAX used Microstation for engineering design and for generating paper construction drawings. The drawings were used by the construction team to build new facilities and were returned as marked up drawings to the records folks who digitized them into the Oracle RDBMS. If I remember there was team of six or so people responsible for this and of course there was a long backlog. The backlog meant that the Oracle RDBMS was always out of date. To address this problem, ENMAX has implemented a new integrated solution using Autodesk Map as the desktop engineering design application and Oracle Spatial as the spatial database. This enables ENMAX to address the as-built problem, so that design drawings are captured directly into the spatial database at design time and no longer need to be re-digitized from paper drawings.

Q In India Autodesk software is used widely by the data creation companies to digitize data. Does Autodesk have any plan to provide a complete solution through which these companies can digitize as well as georeference and further analyse the data in a single cycle?

A This is the focus of the next release of Autodesk Map to be released in April 2006. Instead of simply being an AutoCAD with some geospatial capability, Autodesk Map3D 2007 is now much more a geospatial engine with access to AutoCAD if required. It's architecture is designed around the Feature Data Object (FDO) API. FDO is our method of communicating with feature-based geodata. We can communicate with a variety of feature data sources through this interface including Oracle Locator/Spatial, SQL Server, ArcSDE, shape files, MySQL, and others through this interface. When spatial information is retrieved from a data source through FDO, it is streamlined directly to the rendering engine so that graphical performance and scalability is dramatically improved. One can manage a much larger number of graphical objects on the screen with the new release.

Q What is your view on Autodesk File Formats? The file formats will definitely be interoperable with other GIS softwares. Will this format be partially or fully open?

A An absolutely critical aspect of Autodesk's geospatial products is that they are designed to support natively different geospatial data sources. This means that you can directly query, retrieve, and edit geospatial data stored in Oracle Locator/Spatial, shape files, MySQL, SQL Server, ArcSDE, and other vector formats. Autodesk Map3D 2007, MapGuide Open Source, and MapGuide Enterprise all rely on the Feature Data Object (FDO) interface to access natively vector data sources. FDO provides a full vector editing API, which includes data versioning and long transactions. In addition FDO enables applications to retrieve and display imagery. FDO enables Autodesk products to share geospatial data, for example in Oracle Locator/Spatial, with applications from other vendors. For example, at the recent GITA Conference in Tampa, Florida, two municipalities, the City of San Jose and the City of Tacoma spoke about deployed systems that integrated multi-vendor applications from Autodesk, ESRI, Bentley, Intergraph, and MapInfo on a common shared Oracle Spatial database management system. For traditional Autodesk users who rely on DWG files, Autodesk has released a set of libraries under the name RealDWG which allows customers to develop custom applications that read and write DWG files.

Q What is Autodesk's stance towards open source softwares? Lat year Autodesk moved its internet GIS to the open source domain, but was that the first and the last such initiative or will there be more things through which Autodesk will be moving towards open source in the days to come?

A First of all, there are some common misconceptions about open source that I have run into that I would like to try to clear up. The first is that open source is only a small part of the software industry. The last time I looked there were about 100,000 projects hosted by Source Forge, which is only one of many sites hosting open source projects. About 70% of the world's web sites run the Apache Foundation's web server software. I saw a statistic recently that most of the Fortune 500 companies have deployed open source software, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python, Sendmail, and others.

Another common misconception is that the opposite of open source software is commercial software. The reality is that there are two types of commercial software, open source and closed source (sometime called proprietary). Many commercial companies base their business entirely around open source software. Commercial open source companies include Red Hat and MySQL, which are internationally well-known examples. In the geospatial realm, DMSolutions is an example of a company that has based a very successful business entirely around open source geospatial software. Some companies support both closed and open source software, for example, Novell (who acquired SUSE), Oracle (who just acquired Innodb and Sleepycat), Sun ( who sell Star Office which is based on Open Office), IBM (who distribute Apache web server and Eclipse), Autodesk (who will sell MapGuide Enterprise which is based on MapGuide Open Source), and others. Also common is the misconception that all open source projects are comprised of volunteers working at home in the evenings or weekends. The implication of this is that the quality of open source software is not up to the standards of closed source software. In the geospatial arena Autodesk's contribution to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation was developed, and will continue to be maintained, by full-time, professional Autodesk developers.

With respect to quality, as I alluded to earlier, many of the world's major corporations have deployed open source software. Open source proponents like Eric Raymond argue plausibly that open source is capable of achieving higher standards of quality because more developers look at the code. The reality is that, like closed source software, you have to assess each open source project or product based on its own merits.

A simple way to summarize the situation is that the commercial software industry uses two models, closed and open source, and that both play an important role in delivering solutions to the IT industry. Some software companies prefer the closed source model, some the open, and some rely on both.