 
Beyond the obvious simplification of the mouthful that was Leica
Geosystems Geospatial Imaging, the new ERDAS name speaks to a broader
vision. I spoke with Mladen Stojic, senior vice president, product
management and marketing, about the name change and the vision.
V1: The new focus on
business seems to echo what I've been hearing lately, that consumer
demand for geospatial information is outstripping government demand,
and that there's a new opportunity for geospatial information within
business.
Stojic: Our traditional
customers are taking another look at their business. Instead of just
focusing on the technology to produce data, they recognize that they
have to empower their organization and not just build a GIS or a remote
sensing system. They have to empower their organization and go beyond
just creating data. They need to connect the components to a larger
business system.
Even though we're still going after customers that are producing
orthos, terrain and features and publishing those as services, we're
talking to our customers and making sure that their technology is
integrated into a geospatial business system. The "Earth to Business"
tagline relates to taking Earth-based information and transforming it
to business information as part of a larger value chain.
The value chain is where we get into authoring of data, the
management of that data so that it can be shared, the connecting of
that data to other people, and the delivery of that data and
information to a larger audience. We're not just building
photogrammetric, GIS, remote sensing, image processing, feature
extraction or web service systems, we are in fact building business
systems that allow our customers to recover the cost of investment and
make money off the things that they're doing.
V1: I like this focus on
empowering your traditional customers. How would you describe this new
focus in terms of solving business issues?
Stojic: We understand our
customers that produce the source content that is subsequently used to
produce information products. They've solved the authoring component,
they know how to produce orthos, they know how to produce features,
they know how to produce land cover maps and cartography. They've been
doing that for the last 30 years, but now they've hit a business wall.
The wall that they've hit is understanding how to manage that data
so that more people can get access. And they've hit a wall on how to
extract information that is tied to business. They've hit a wall on how
to share this high-volume content and how to deliver that content and
information to more users.
What we're now doing with ERDAS is to help them overcome the
obstacles and barriers. We're now taking them down this value chain,
and as you move down the value chain the value of the data and
information increases. As a light ray passes through a lens cone or CCD
and a pixel is recorded, the value of the pixel is low until you do
something to it. As you author that pixel or feature or map, it's value
increases. As you manage that data and expose it to more people, its
value increases. As you share that data through various sharing
technologies, its value increases. As you publish that data through OGC
services or sell it as subscription services to mobile devices, its
value increases.
What we're doing is essentially increasing the value of geospatial
data and information. We provide a full gamut of solutions, and we want
to increase the value of location-based data and other types of
geospatial data.
V1: With the four pieces of
author, manage, collect and deliver, is there one area where you're
putting more R&D dollars to solve specific problems?
Stojic: It's actually quite
evenly distributed among the four, but we're focusing on key business
themes in all areas. Performance is one of those key areas, as people
want information faster.
In the authoring area, we're looking at increasing the performance
of specific workflows for producing data. That relates to producing
remotely sensed data products, photogrammetrically derived data
products and feature products. We're rolling out in mid to late April
our automated feature extraction capability as an open beta. We are
solving automation and performance problems.
Moving along to managing, we're now in the process of consolidating
and integrating all of the various technologies that we bought over the
course of the last 12 months. We've kicked off an internal project that
has four primary phases, and its purpose is to build a comprehensive
enterprise, SOA-based, business platform that allows organizations to
find data, to harvest metadata, to catalog the data, to process data
and to subsequently deliver data and value-added information products
to Web clients, domain-specific rich clients and mobile clients.
The first manifestation of that data management vision is that what
was Leica Image Manager is now ERDAS Image Manager. Over the course of
the next 12 to 18 months we'll go beyond image management, adding
support for features, for KML, for 3D and terrain data. The management
component is the critical component that lets an organization
understand its data holdings so that value-added information products
can be created and delivered.
For the connect component we have TITAN and the TITAN GeoHub to
solve the sharing problem. By solving the sharing problem you're once
again increasing the value of the information so that users both inside
and outside the organization to get access to the information. The
GeoHub allows organizations to solve security privileges and to connect
to a variety of different data stores and to connect users that are
using Google Earth, Microsoft Live local, various web clients and CAD
clients. We're working on the sharing problem.
Lastly, on the delivery side, we're working on geoportals and
subscription models for people to sell their data as either static
content or dynamic content that's facilitated by server-based
geoprocessing. That's the final delivery aspect of a geospatial
business system that allows these organizations to recoup the
investment associated with producing the data in the first place.
V1: How are you rolling out the new organization?
Stojic: We've launched a new website at www.erdas.com
that gets the name and vision out as soon as possible. We're working on
consolidating all the individual product websites into this main site,
and will complete that project toward the end of summer. We're also
launching webinars, and plan to have one every two weeks. The webinars
will be very solutions focused.
There are three primary themes that we'll be pushing throughout the
year. The first is "Earth to Business," and we'll be defining what that
means and how that benefits customers and businesses. The second is our
answer to Earth to Business, what we call a geospatial business system
and how the four primary components and how those are used within an
organization to solve very specific business problems. And third, we'll
be talking about the value of information and the value of data. This
is where we talk about return on investment and how to recover the cost
associated with capturing, producing and managing data. We'll spend
time focusing on that while also providing solutions to our customers.
You'll see a lot of those three messages tied to product positioning
and messaging. From a high-level market message, those are the three
primary themes that we'll be promoting throughout the course of 2008
and some of 2009.
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