I recently spoke with both Reid French, COO of Intergraph, and Mark Doherty, CTO of the Security, Government and Infrastructure Division. The nagging question on my mind was whether Hexagon’s purchase of Intergraph might mark a renewed focus on developing a broad geospatial software platform, but those days appear long gone.
According to French: “The one thing that you’ll find at our core level is that we’ll continue to look at ways to make the data handoff from their devices into our applications easier for our customers. I don’t think you will see us moving away from our vertical focus. We will continue our strategy of having vertical market solutions to fit the industries that we target, including public safety, military & intelligence, government, transportation, utilities and process, power and marine markets. We’ll continue to focus on those markets, and the workflows that they have, so that we can deliver a solution to them that solves their needs, versus just a broad platform.”
My perceived limitation on this approach is a lack of trained users on the platform that can further customize it, and develop further solutions against it.
According to Doherty: “What we have to do to be successful with this model is to stick to specific industries and target them. We don’t just throw a platform over the wall and hope there are partners that will adopt it. For example, we have a sizable operation in Central Europe where we’ve built our own utility infrastructure management solution on top of our core platform for the region. The industry experts that developed that take it to market for that region. That’s been quite successful. We obviously can’t cover everything that way.”
For more depth into the company’s position and platform strategy, you can read the full interview on V1 Magazine here.
