This morning at Intergraph 2008, Mark Doherty, executive director, Technology Architecture and Strategy, presented the Technology Vision Roadmap for Intergraph’s Security, Government & Infrastructure (SG&I) division. The talk began with a framing of the SG&I division, with it’s tailored solutions for public safety, government and transportation, defense and intelligence, utilities, communications and photogrammetry. Doherty indicated that the technology roadmap takes into account more technology trends than a horizontal technology company, because they are driven by many industry-specific needs.
Intergraph’s core technology platforms for the SG&I division are incident/work management and records management in addition to their foundation of geospatial capabilities. Records management includes public safety incidence data as well as the TerraShare product’s ability to fuse imagery, LIDAR and video.
Key Industry Trends
Doherty outlined a number of technology trends that are driving technology development and research investments:
- Interoperability and integration – Interoperability is at the top of a lot of people’s list of things they need to deal with. On the the security side there’s the issue of integrating a lot of sensors.
- Better decision support tools – The issue is to accomplish more with less, with tools to make you more productive. Emergence of 3D models, changes the ways that people interact with information and data. Integraph is also focused on bringing together a lot of data sources and sensors information into the mix.
- Increasing Mobility – Doing more in the field, wider number of devices and platforms. Those working in the field want to do the majority of their job in the field.
- Changing Workforce – More than an aging workforce, baby boomers are exiting and the Internet generation is entering. This new tech savvy generation have a high expectation on how technology will assist them in their jobs.
- Going Green – Green industry impacts in utilities and governments are on everyone’s mind (even though in Las Vegas there’s nowhere to recycle). Smart grid systems to control and monitor energy efficiency are key. As is the greening of IT, with the consolidation and virtualization of data centers.
Key Technology Trends
Doherty also focused on key technology trends that are affecting how Intergraph delivers technology to solve problems:
- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) – There’s an increasing demand for flexible, reusable, and agile platforms
- New technology deployment strategies – Deployments through virtualization, appliances (geospatial box that fuses data, software, hardware) and smart clients moves away from traditional desktop and server-based approaches.
- Software as a Service (SaaS) – Software tools that don’t require install on your enterprise servers are gaining ground, led by SalesForce.com. These hosted solutions ofer benefits on administration costs, and Doherty feels that both Virtual Earth and Google Maps are providing a capability similar to SaaS, and these consumer-oriented sites are increasingly influencing how technology is delivered.
To deliver next-generation capabilities, Doherty discussed Integraph’s commitment to both Oracle and Microsoft as a foundation. On the database side of things, Intergraph will continue to exploit data tier technology advancements, including Oracle Data Guard and Oracle Spatial, and will also embrace the spatial extension to SQL Server. For desktop and client applications, Intergraph continues to exploit the Windows presentation foundation and sees Silverlight as a promising technology for both the desktop and the web browser.
Several initiatives are ongoing at Intergraph to lead to a more integrated and aligned technology platform, aligning GeoMedia and G/Technology and leveraging advancement into the public safety market. The start has begun with an enhanced data model that underpins how products interact and interoperate. There’s also a push to enhance spatial data visualization capabilities.
The consolidation of the platform technology will make it possible for users to seamlessly take advantage of all Intergraph geospatial tools, and it frees Intergraph resources to focus on enhancements and innovation. Improved meta data configuration tools reduce system management costs. Public Safety, GeoMedia and G/Technology all gain LDAP based identity and access management and the consolidation will dramatically ease the issue of bringing information together.
I’ll report some more details about specific technology changes in future posts.
