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Geoinformatics_04-2009
interview ness operations including the decision-making process. in the united states, the government's plan to stimulate our economy with a variety of capital infrastructure investments will require geospatial information in many forms. in addition, there is a sense among some economists that the economy will rebound the quickest in the housing, construction, energy, and infrastructure sectors— all gis-related industries. today, the business value of gis is often justified on the potential return on investment. this process is helping justify the implementation of a gis even in difficult times, pointing to costs avoided, additional revenue gained, and improvements in efficiency. bentley: bentley s approach is threefold; we allow organizations to increase their productivity by advancing their current gis investments and therefore making them more suitable for infrastructure projects; we integrate gis into mainstream it, increasing the value of the gis professional and we continue to integrate more gis functionality into our mainstream software products. to summarize; bentley helps organizations to maximize the roi on their gis investments. even in an economic downturn, there is still substantial investment in infrastructure projects both in those that were ongoing before the downturn, and in those that are newly funded as part of the plethora of national economic stimulus packages. within specific industries there are also disruptive changes underway that are making user organizations review the role of gis technology such as the advent of smart grid technologies in the electric utilities industry. bentley is well placed to take advantage of these changes. intergraph: certainly we have seen an increased focus on return on investment as a primary factor when organizations are determining which projects will move forward. this is true whether in a government organization where return on investment is driven by providing new capabilities for citizens or in the private sector, which is typically driven by the bottom line. now more than ever in the current economic downturn, we must work closely with our customers to show how the application of geospatial technologies and geospatial best practices can help them realize a return on investment that allows them to fund new projects. we see this creating opportunities in areas as diverse as public safety and electric utilities. in public safety, intergraph offers advanced analytical tools that allow public safety agencies to better understand their response patterns and ultimately better deploy their resources to meet those demands. in electric utilities, intergraph is actively participating in the smart grid initiative by providing an integrated command-and-control center that allows utilities to run more effectively both in terms of the manpower necessary to operate the utility and in terms of better managing the energy consumption of the utility and its customers. both of these areas show strong returns on investment that make sense even in these difficult economic times. esri: the efforts by the european union in implementing large-scale gis systems that support spatial data infrastructure, environmental monitoring, satellite navigation, and similar applications are important and highly commendable. successfully implementing these projects at this scale is challenging, particularly when considering the number of countries involved. the united states has similar national initiatives in many of our national and state agencies. while not as high profile, they are nevertheless evolving in a less-coordinated manner unique to our government organizations. while the consumer-oriented map visualization applications have significantly contributed to increasing the general understanding and appreciation of geography, their main focus has been less on proton de vries, bentley s fessional applications and more on spatializcadastre and land development solution ing search. similar to europe, we certainly do executive not see these systems as a substitute for authoritative source-based web systems. nevertheless, they do provide a kind of narrow view of what the future may hold. at esri, we have been working on a new cloud-based gis program, arcgis online, that focuses on agencies and users sharing their content, services, and applications on the web. this promises to provide a model for how sdi will emerge. bentley: on both sides of the atlantic organizations are looking for interoperability; whether this is channeled by legislation and standards or by de-facto industry standards. the goal is the same; the unification of silos of information into accessible formats and interfaces, allowing the integration and sharing of valuable data to support business workflows. integration and interoperability have been the two cornerstones of bentley s infrastructure and gis product portfolio; so our users are well prepared for these initiatives. intergraph: what we are really analyzing here is an apparent difference in focus between large government initiatives with substantial geospatial components versus adding value to private sector geospatial platforms. regarding google and microsoft s commercial geospatial platforms, we see demand for organizations to exploit these platforms in both the united states and in europe. in europe, they are used not as a replacement for initiatives such as inspire, but simply as a complementary set of data and technology to those managed by the organization. in terms of commercial geospatial platforms like google maps or microsoft virtual earth being adopted to create a de facto sdi, technologically it is possible. however, there are fundamental control issues and certainly data licensing and usage policies that need to be worked through before many organizations would consider turning this role over to the private sector. in the case of significant eu initiatives such as inspire, gmes and seis, any difference in focus between europe and the u.s. is simply a function of the emphasis and funding that is behind these eu initiatives. with inspire being a formal eu directive now being transitioned to law in the eu, member states are obviously having a great impact on the geospatial sector in the eu and on any companies that participate in the eu market. inspire s directives surrounding spatial data infrastructure (sdi) and data harmonization across eu member states are forcing data and technology providers to react to these requirements. in the u.s., while there have been some top down and bottom up efforts directed toward the creation of a national sdi for some time, this hasn t june 2009 in europe the gis-industry is very focused on inspire, gmes, seis and galileo at the moment. in the u.s. no one cares about that, but i have the feeling that gisindustry is much more focused on what google, microsoft and yahoo does and how to integrate their products. what is your opinion on this statement? 38
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