Tuesday, June 16. 2009

High Level Road Map for Intergraph Geospatial

John Graham, president of Intergraph's Security, Government and Infrastructure (SG&I) division provided a basic, high level road map for his division's product strategy. He will focus product development efforts on supporting the needs of spatial data infrastructure initiatives as well as 3D visualization.

The core platforms that the company has been selling for the last several years will be combined into a single platform. The product solutions which included GeoMedia, G/Technology, and TerraShare, will eventually have a single framework. This has been in development for the last two years.

Graham also stated that, "We will not be adding new industry focuses but will look for opportunities to develop core competencies." Specifically, he sees his division focusing on SmartGrid, Security, the integration of business intelligence with geospatial and leveraging consumer mapping platforms such as Bing Maps for the Enterprise and Google Earth. "The plethora of consumer maps will continue to increase because it is so useful. It’s a validation that (maps) are something important," said Graham.

GeoMedia 6.1: Continued Product Enhancements Plus a Focus on 3D

Intergraph announced new product enhancements for GeoMedia 6.1, their flagship geospatial solution. The emphasis for this version centered on support for the spatial data infrastructure (SDI) initiatives in the U.S. and Europe (INSPIRE) as well as for 3D visualization.

Enhancements include:

• GeoMedia 6.1 will integrate with Microsoft's Bing Maps for the Enterprise and Google Maps via KML;
• Planned usability improvements in thematic generation and display (coming in Q3)
• Support for new OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) for viewing imagery
• Regional address geocoding models are supported, a European requirement, and address matching performance improvements were made
• OGC Web Catalogue Services now conform to ISO standards
• a web feature service for transactions called WFS-T (coming in Q3)
• improvements to elevation value assignment during data capture – the snap to height feature (coming in Q3)
• support for Flash to replace SVG for graphic rendering in GeoMedia WebMap (coming in Q4)
• support for SQL Server 2008 Spatial as an option (coming early 2010)

Specific to cartographic production workflows, the company announced the new GeoMedia MapPublisher 6.1 that put an emphasis on moving map production into the GeoMedia environment. This included:

• Separate database for storing cartographic edits to maintain the integrity of source data that eliminates the need for multiple copies of the source
• Provide both automated and manual editing tools for cartographic adjustments; automated style suppression
• Planned automated generalization (coming in 2010)

Specific to road, rail and other network applications, the company announced:

• a new feature called "Multiple Linear Referencing System"
• support for overweight/oversized vehicle routing
• Straight Line Diagrams – linear information in a straight line view in addition to the geographic view

Intergraph 09 Opens With CEO Wise Stating “We’re not afraid to set aggressive goals.”

Intergraph CEO Halsey Wise (at right) opened the 2009 Intergraph user conference by acknowledging the global economic turbulence, with a hurricane graphic in the background to emphasize his point, and by stating "We are not afraid to set aggressive goals. We will use this trough to power through to the future. Some of our competitors have not even had the courage to hold their user event [this year]."

Wise cited several performance metrics to illustrate the success the company has realized:

• In 2008, the company reached $808 million
• Intergraph has grown operating profits 9x since 2003
• Intergraph R&D spending was $95.2M in 2008, an increase of 40% over last five years
• 32% of revenue comes from products that did not exist in 2003

Wise has set a goal of reaching $1 billion in revenue by 2012 and told the audience to "pay attention...next year we will announce new products and maybe new acquisitions."