Industry Leaders Look to What’s Next…Cloud? Big Data? #GWF

Vanessa Lawrence, the Director General of the Ordnance Survey, Great Britain, led a spirited discussion of industry leaders about their vision for geospatial. Here are some excerpts:


Mohan Reddy, Chairman, Founder and Managing Director, Infotech Enterprises said, “The future is in cloud because it reduces capex (capital expenditures). The direction for the industry looks positive. We’re perceiving the business coming back; GDP is moving up, the stock market is coming back. The end user is moving in the direction where they expect value for their money. Don’t just build applications for application sake.”

Matt O’Connell, CEO, GeoEye said he sees three trends that will affect the development of the industry:

1. Increased reliance on the commercial industry by governments around the world;
2. Relying less on government resources and more on the commercial sector. Commercial information is no longer an afterthought but now a crucial part of government information;
3. Geospatial information that is more freely available. In India, O’Connell encouraged a more open data policy to Kapil Sibal at a private meeting.

Kanwar Chadha, chief marketing officer of CSR said, “We are moving into a world that is connected and geospatially aware…Many devices are getting connected and the data is becoming cloud-resident. We are not only using the content but contributing to content in the cloud. Content in the cloud is accessible anywhere, anytime.”He further believes that location-based data has to be located by more than GPS for indoor applications indicated that it will take other sensors and platform to get these locations.

Steve Hagan, VP of Development for Oracle Server said there were four global trends driving cloud computing mentioned here. He also said that to enable “big data” volumes that you need flexible capacity (grid architecture); smart scan; smart flash cache (specifically for raster data which has a large requirement for data storage); and data compression; infiniband (networking to support massive data transfers).

Brian Bullock, chairman, Intermap Technologies, said that, “A disruptive change always start at the bottom of the market. New companies offer cheaper solutions. These companies move upmarket. Geospatial technology will require improvements to the digital databases. We believe the most important part of the database is an accurate 3d database.”