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Here are the interim details of our poll to date. There is still time to cast your opinion.
Like it or not, if you were a customer of either Intergraph or ERDAS and wanted to know what the marriage of these two companies will mean, it has happened, and the integration at the product level will only get tighter. Assuming you knew about the relationship of these companies, whereby ERDAS (acquired by Hexagon in 2005) is now within the Intergraph Security, Government and Infrastructure (SG&I) division (acquired by Hexagon in 2010), the product integration strategy is being hashed out in significant detail. Joel Campbell, president of ERDAS calls it "Dynamic GIS." Underpinning the technical strategy is a relatively new initiative called EGF, for Enhanced Geospatial Foundation, the internal name for a new platform upon which all existing Intergraph and ERDAS products will eventually be built. EGF will also be the foundation for tighter integration with Intergraph's G/Technology for the utilities industry and also for I/CAD, Intergraph's computer-aided dispatch solution for emergency management and E911.
Begun at the time when Hexagon acquired Intergraph, product strategists set to work on how Intergraph's GeoMedia GIS and ERDAS's IMAGINE image processing software would seamlessly integrate data. Product teams went through each product's portfolio, functionality and workflow to determine the strengths of each and over a six-month period where able to determine how the integration would be accomplished. David Glenn, a senior product development manager, said that "A lot of mutual respect was developed in those meetings. It didn't take but 30 seconds before we knew exactly what each other was talking about on any issue…There was a lot of synergy in those conversations." Mladen Stojic, ERDAS's senior vice president for product management and marketing, said, "The first focus was interoperability with existing systems."
To accomplish this, the product teams created "Live Link," a one-button function on the ribbon bar that gives the user a "pipe of communications between the two applications that will allow you to synchronize displays," said Stojic. He further describes this "as you zoom into IMAGINE (data window) the spatial extents are displayed and rendered within the GeoMedia view." This allows panning and zooming for visualization. This is being worked on as part of the 2012 release of IMAGINE and the update to GeoMedia next year.
The key question with which customer will eventually be faced is "which product should be used for spatial querying and analysis and which for more specific takes like data editing or image processing. Some will be obvious; other's not so. Down the road will the two products merge? It's a little too early to make that call. Certainly there will be overlap and workflows may need to take advantage of the best product for the job. The product teams however are committed to something called "Solution Builder" a graphical interface to create and save task workflows (the equivalent is Model Builder in ArcGIS). For example, eventually it may be possible to call model routines created and processed in IMAGINE, (e.g. a supervised classification to detect riparian vegetation) and integrate the results within GeoMedia as a vector file for thematic mapping. Stojic said that "we want to be able to support bi-directional communication and workflows for customers…This is going beyond the 'Live Link' to actually embedding functionality within the application." Glenn believes "this is an orchestration tool and what you have to do is expose all your functionality as operators that your orchestration tool can get at. I think long term we may support a variety of orchestration tools."
Some of the product overlap may be in the areas of LiDAR data processing and some basic thematic mapping. However, Intergraph seems to focus more attention on platform investments and ERDAS more on product-level enhancements. For example, Intergraph is making sure the EGF is Microsoft Azure-ready and that GeoMedia will work with SQL Server. ERDAS announced that they will offer enhancements to their viewing platform; support 64-bit processing; GPU-level support; and better point cloud handling as well as automated feature extraction and change detection.
The SaaS or other cloud strategy is a little, "cloudy." I could see ERDAS's APOLLO used as a possible option. APOLLO's strength is managing and delivering large volumes of unstructured geospatial data. But again, I think that's a decision that has not yet been made.
Perhaps the trickier issues involves a go-to-market strategy so as not to confuse the client with cross-product features or re-branding of each product under a single identity. The rebranding issue is down the road, perhaps, but SG&I must clearly articulate the product workflows and give clients a roadmap of features, functions and the interoperability advantages. It will kill the good works of top flight developers who are putting together a sound software integration plan if they don't.
[Disclosure: Travel for this trip was supported by Hexagon]
I don't think I've ever been asked that questions so many times in one day. Along with, "will the merger work?" The short answer is that it's for the clients of Hexagon to decide, not me. For the record, I stated last year that I thought this merger offered great synergy and was a bow shout at Esri. My thinking is slightly different today.
To think about Hexagon's acquisition of first ERDAS then Intergraph as only a geospatial play or only a remote sensing play or only a geopositioning play (Leica Geosystems) or for that matter a metrology (Hexagon Metrology) play would be narrow minded. This is why Ola Rollen, CEO, suggested as much during his press conference at this conference in 2010. While the addition of all of these software and hardware products have appealing synergies and integration possibilities, the company strategy is way beyond simple compound addition. It's also simplistic to think of this as an "enterprise IT" play. Again, it wouldn't tell the whole story.
Rollen positioned the combination of solution expertise as having the ability to solve project lifecycle management problems, from design through construction and all the way to post-construction maintenance. If this has a familiar ring I think that's because it sounds more like that of an Autodesk or a Bentley Systems strategy rather than Esri. Perhaps therein lies the possibility of a Hexagon juggernaut because it has all those "arrows in its quiver." But I perceive that Rollen and his management team care less about the competition and more about seeking the best infrastructure workflows that make the most sense in industries from plant design to public safety.
Listen to the language used in the keynote presentations by the Hexagon management team:
"Provide new technology to improve productivity by 40% in our agriculture business" - Rollen
"We must digitally preserve and share our history" - Jürgon Dold, Hexagon Geosystems (Leica)
" Design-build -operate … Best of class solutions in technology" - Gerhard Salinger (Hexagon, Process, Power and Marine (PPM)
"The future needs innovation" - John Graham, Intergraph SG&I
Other things mentioned were the challenges of "unsustainable growth," "demographic changes" and the use of "renewable resources." To be frank, I thought for a moment that I was indeed early to the Esri UC as these messages are more commonly heard in that forum.
I though it was odd, too, that cloud computing was not mentioned as a strategy in any of the keynote presentations by the division presidents. As I thought about it, it makes sense that this too might be thinking too product centric, something that Hexagon does not want to offer. Because, to talk about the cloud means that you must discuss product features and functions moving to a SaaS environment. If that's what a client wants then I think Hexagon would offer it but that deals with product and not workflow; features and not functional solutions.
Hexagon offered broad visions that gets hearts pounding. But at the end of the day, it's products that sell. That's what must happen for customers to completely buy into the vision. After talking with product managers (see my other reports), I see that happening and I think customers will demand lots of demos and pilot projects to see if it really works as advertised.
However, If Intergraph had perhaps lost its voice since Jim Meadlock and Bob Thurber departed years ago, it may have found it once again.
[Disclosure: Travel for this trip was supported by Hexagon]
Dan Kasun, the senior director of Developer and Platform Evangelism for Microsoft's U.S. Public Sector described the trends that are changing computing. I thought it was a succinct way of describing the disruption taking place today that encompasses, cloud, mobile and social media. Kasun shared his three pillars this way:
Kasun used an example that Microsoft has created call Eye On Earth, a mapping application of European sensor locations that display the status of air and water conditions. But the platform also allows users to rate the status of any place using social media to update the status of the environment with certain rating factors (dirty, clean, etc.). Kasun believes that this platform is a good example of mixing cloud technology with social media and human interaction.
