A little over a year after Intergraph was taken private by three private equity firms Intergraph is building success in their Utility & Communication (U&C) division, a group just recently re-organized within the company. Although the company admits that it has taken some time to align their product technology with their vertical market sectors, it believes that customers are now embracing their direction. Sales in the U&C division reached $76 million in 2007 and projected to go higher this year. Strong growth in Europe is bolstering sales and partnering with large systems integrators like Siemens, Capgemini and Bearing Point allows Intergraph to provide targeted solutions with core technology.

Intergraph has offered a steady path for existing FRAMME customers to move to G/Technology and has moved five to six clients within the last year. Currently they have about 200 customers on G/Technology, which provides the foundation for several modules including water, gas, communications and electric and specific applications in outage management. According to the company, their SmartGrid technology is a means to “integrate communications networks with the power grid in order to create an electricity-communications superhighway capable of monitoring its own health at all times, alerting officials immediately when problems arise and automatically taking corrective action.”

Intergraph relies heavily on Oracle Spatial for data management but does not currently use any of Oracle’s network models feeling that their experience in the utility industry offers a better solution. The company has also begun to offer integration with Business Objects.

I had several conversations with Intergraph’s product executives to help clarify how the licensing would work for users who wanted to leverage Microsoft or Google API’s with GeoMedia (GeoMedia will use a control to instantiate GE or VE from within a GeoMedia client) since there are restrictions on the usage of data as per the API agreements. Each exec supplied basically the same answer that the Intergraph legal team was working through the issue with regard to the pricing and end-user licensing agreement (EULA). However, though it seems that it may be of minimal cost to users like local governments, who wish to use the API’s to support their community services, it is not clear on how commercial users could utlize the same functionality. Intergraph may end up asking users to deal directly with those supplying the web service.

This is not just an issue for Intergraph users but for others who have varying business models that want to leverage the API’s for commercial or public usage. This has to be clearly defined because many people want to exploit the geospatial data/visualization tools that are offered by Microsoft and Google as an embedded object from within other applications. More data will be added by the big mapping portals and more layers of "legalize" will likely occur and as more data is contributed to the library of "community contributed" geospatial information. It's a scary thought but there is already an assumption, especially by those seeing the Intergraph demo, that the data is free.