Mark Doherty, CTO of Intergraph’s Security, Government and Industry (SG&I) division related details on the company’s view on technology trends and the company’s approach to the markets that they serve.
Spatial data infrastructure is a growing issue, with kudos to the European INSPIRE initiative for raising awareness. While the initiative is focused at the national government level, Doherty commented that the work that is underway stands to help all organizations in how they access and distribute their geospatial information.
Within the federal security space the fusion of information from multiple sensors is of continued interest. Sensor integration is growing, particularly in security, where different alarms and sensors are shared, and the information is brought together to monitor and respond to incidents. In this space, he showed a scenario of intelligent sensor data (heat sensor, video) coming into a call center, and displaying an event in context through directed video to the scene. While their new and popular Motion Video Analyst Professional has been targeted toward the military, there is increasing interest in other areas, including pipeline and utility corridor use.
In public security, integrated communications with text messaging and multimedia in addition to voice communication will drive new ways in which incidents are managed. This will lead to new tools for officers in the field, with a growing emphasis on handheld devices.
In the private infrastructure space, the move is on toward smart grid to understand systems in more holistic ways. In this realm, Intergraph has a partnership with Siemens, and there’s an impressive systems integration going on with Oncor Electric Delivery of Texas with a 3-million customer base.
Intergraph continues to emphasize Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as the best approach with the most flexibility. Loosely coupled software components that are standards based are flexible and agile and can be reused.
There is a growing momentum for the evolution from thick clients to thin clients and smart clients. The move away from dedicated servers to a virtualized infrastructure where you can’t point to specific boxes as the host of different systems is transforming how server-based technologies are deployed. Software as a Service (SaaS) or hosted solutions that often times run in the cloud, are another focus of the company. Intergraph are in the process of certifying their WebMap product on Amazon’s EC2 cloud platform to help test the interest in this approach.
On the database side, Intergraph is working both with Oracle and Microsoft. Their application platform is primarily Microsoft .NET, and they are now doing some things with Java.
Increasingly moving more toward Web and mobile clients for enterpise wide access and applications. Thin client applications are taking hold on the mobile front on iPhone and Blackberry. To date, Intergraph serves most mobile apps in a browser-based implementation, but they are working on platform specific applications, with the integrated capabilities that take advantage of the sensors and capabilities of these devices. The ultimate goal are thin clients that sit on top of a group of services that rests on a foundational database.
Intergraph is also at work on a next-generation geospatial platform that improves display capabilities, routing, location verification and analysis. The new platform is services-based and takes advantage the user interface improvements from AJAX and Silverlight environments. They intend to include tiling and caching schemes for high performance. The target date for this new geospatial functionality is late 2011.
