ERDAS’ Sweet Spot: Handling Large Data Sets

Rare is the opportunity that I get to hash out a vision for geospatial technology with a vendor.  Usually it’s all about product enhancements, features, and functionality, especially at a trade show. My conversation with Mladen Stojic, SVP of Product Mgmt. and Marketing for ERDAS was different and its important to know that there are some vendors that can offer clients forethought and direction. Stojic believes that, in a connected world, that spatial models and content can be married in a more coherent manner.

It is a vision that is not communicated enough to those looking to get a job done because of the flood of data, diverse list of products, explosion of web services, and new apps that are launched in the cloud. ERDAS seems to be putting lots of emphasis on handling large data sets. "We do that really, really well…we handle a variety of formats and we do that really, really well," said Stojic. So, if you are wrestling with what to do with both airborne and space imagery, LiDAR or any type of ground-based data, ERDAS wants you.

ERDAS made a number of announcements at the GEOINT show this week but more importantly is for the company to express their vision to clients in an ever-crowded market for geospatial tools. Stojic thinks that rule-based models, he calls them "recipes," provides a better way of following a workflow that eventually leads to an more efficient way to derive answers to questions most users have. But ERDAS seems to back up the rule-based solutions with product platforms that serve that vision. Their authoring (IMAGINE), management (Apollo), connected environment (TITAN), and delivery mechanism (Image Web Services) solutions suite their vision well.