Just after the final session was held at GITA's Annual Conference, Executive Director Bob Samborski sat down with Editor-in-chief Joe Francica to review the association's new emphasis on infrastructure and its special track dedicated to emergency response. Samborski shared his thoughts on how the change affected this year's event planning and the conscious effort to highlight the importance that GITA members bring to solving the challenges brought on by the world's aging gas, water, electric and telecommunication utilities.

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At next week's DevSummit, ESRI will announce an API for ArcGIS Explorer. Called ArcGIS Explorer Objects, a software developer will be able "re-skin" the app as well as toggle between 2D and 3D for example. A few additional products in the ArcGIS Explorer family will be announced as well.

UPDATE: Source of my information was provided by Bernie Szukalski during at demo at GITA. He believed it was a significant development.

At the GITA conference, Mark Doherty of Intergraph raised an interesting point in his presentation. He compared commonly accepted standards as proposed for the OGC, for example, versus "defacto" or perhaps more commonly "used" standards that may be neither "open" (in the current vernacular) nor a true standard. His examples recognized WMS and WFS as an example of common specifications. While the analogy is not quite accurate, his "defacto" standard was the use of Oracle Spatial as a platform more commonly chosen to manage spatial data. You might think of KML as another "defacto" standard for sharing data on the Google platforms.

It raises an interesting point of whether some standards or specifications are too fleeting; here today but fade when the market determines something different. And how does someone with the responsiblity of developing an enterprise architecture decide.

GeoPDF from TerraGo Technologies has been around for a few years and the ability to capture a window of geospatial information from your desktop GIS system and export it to PDF provides not only data compression but an easy way to share data with people who have the Adobe Reader. Now, TerraGo is going further with the free GeoPDF Reader by offering:

• The ability to view data in a variety of projections
• Right click to link a MBR to a Google Map
• Import ShapeFiles
• Output from GeoPDF to KML

Another fairly slick addition to the Map2PDF Professional version is the ability to assemble a "mapbook." This utility can combine a series of GeoPDF's into a single, seamless file.

And if you haven't heard about it, the USGS has put all 55,000 USGS quad maps online (USGS Store) for free download in GeoPDF format.

At last year’s GITA conference, GE Energy announced plans to develop a suite of products on the Oracle Spatial platform. This past January, they released the first application on Oracle for electric distribution and at the conference announced another for gas distribution. The company believes that while many larger utilities may not be quite ready to migrate from an existing SmallWorld configuration, these recent product announcements on Oracle are a first step toward offering a suite of business applications.

GE maintains that it will continue to support SmallWorld and MAGIC indefinitely. They believe that customers will still use it for a customized GIS solution. GE also offers and “office suite” of applications on SmallWorld technology and will build its suite of applications on Oracle in parallel.

GE recently purchased Fichtner IT Consulting, a German engineering company that has a software solution built on Oracle. GE believes that Fichtner will support “mining” of data assets as customers move into the Oracle environment

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.