Do you need data to go??

Gridded Data Provisioning Solution built on ERDAS APOLLO Image Manager...

Check it out!

http://www10.giscafe.com/nbc/articles/view_article.php?articleid=702262

ERDAS APOLLO Reference Sites

With a new enterprise product suite on the market, it's extremely important to have reference sites and to determine "who" is using the ERDAS APOLLO and "what" they are doing with it.

Here's a small list of some of the ERDAS APOLLO customers that have Press Releases:

British Transport Police Preparing for 2012 Olympics with ERDAS APOLLO

Cyprus University of Technology Implementing ERDAS APOLLO

ERDAS APOLLO 2009 Selected by China’s National Environmental Protection Ministry

ERDAS Solutions Used for Tourism 3D Spatial Analysis

Saxon Forestry in Germany Implementing ERDAS APOLLO

CycloMedia Implements ERDAS Image Manager

Capturing & Delivering Digital Imagery of the Netherlands

ERDAS APOLLO Image Manager: Saxon Forestry in Germany Case Study

Need interoperable delivery of huge volumes of gridded data? See the Saxon Forestry in Germany Case Study.

ERDAS APOLLO Image Manager: Cyclomedia Case Study

Need management of 75 TB of rapidly increasing imagery??? Check out this Case Study for Cyclomedia and the ERDAS APOLLO Image Manager 2009.

EAIM 2009 R2 Released

The ERDAS APOLLO Image Manager 2009 R2 has officially been RELEASED!! The performance improvements are incredible! HUGE Volumes of imagery in their original formats delivered even faster! Please request the EAIM Performance Benchmarks Whitepaper to see the numbers...I'm very, very happy with the results.

The new high performance catalog with CSW interface has made such a huge difference in all aspects of the software. Not only from a user experience in WMS and CSW Catalog Search response times but the ability of a single server to handle a large load of web clients, concurrent GI Crawlers and CPU intensive jobs (i.e. Clip, Zip and Ship).

GET READY for the market previews of the ERDAS APOLLO Web Processing Service (WPS)!!!! I've never been so excited about a software feature before!! A preview will be coming in the NEW ERDAS Labs website soon, so stay tuned!!

EAIM 2009 Release

It's official! The ERDAS APOLLO Image Manager 2009 has been released!!!

What a great major release of the EAIM 2009! The software bundle has also been repositioned so that every EAIM 2009 purchase recieves an ERDAS APOLLO Server 2009 as well to provide Enterprise Vector Service Enabling (WMS, WFS-T).

In addition, two major wins for the EAIM 2009 coinciding with this release, both with direct head-to-head evaluations with the competitor!

1. The British Transport Police
2. 3001

If you have large volumes of raster data that you need to server to multiple GIS/Remote Sensing/Web/Open Source clients, you need to check this out!

Just to bullet one particular feature in this release, I'm VERY happy with the Defense Formats for EAIM 2009! NITF and TFRD with RPC's or Defense Sensor Models, NO PROBLEM! The EAIM will catalog this imagery, utilize the related terrain source to perform "ortho-on-the-fly" and deliver GIS ready imagery for real time access through WMS and WCS and also available for download as orthorectified imagery through the Clip, Zip and Ship web based workflow. DTED, CADRG, ADRG, CIB all supported. AWSOME!

The EAIM 2009 is the most comprehensive gridded data server in the world! The EAIM will deliver data in any protocol you require:

1. WMS
2. WCS
3. ECWP
4. JPIP
5. Out-of-Band

You have to see the WebEx presentations scheduled for October!

ERDAS Apollo Image Manager 2009

There is so much NEW in this August 2008 version...EVEN THE NAME! The Leica Image Manager has now been renamed to the ERDAS Apollo Image Manager 2009! We have also "synched" our version numbers with our flagship application ERDAS IMAGINE to v.9.3.

This version marks a MAJOR milestone in the ERDAS Apollo Enterprise Software Suite. the EAIM 2009 is a true vertical market solution developed on the Apollo Enterprise SDK (release Feb 09) and now comes with the Apollo Platform, a full vector management and OGC Web Services Platform!!!! Not only manage imagery, but manage vectors from disperate data sources, create, style and publish WMS, WFS, WCS services and catalog them in the NEW Apollo Catalog.

The BETA Release has been announced today! Get your BETA ON!

Whats New?

1. An end-to-end WEB BASED Clip, Zip and Ship Workflow
2. JPIP SERVER!!!! Integrated with the EAIM 2009 Data model and WEB SDK through the ERDAS Web Plugins. Who's ready for web based JPIP!!!
2. NITF 2.1 support (with commercial and defense RPC sensor model support and Defense Sensor Models with the Defense Productivity Module)!!!!
3. Defense format support - DOD Metadata support, CIB, ADRG, CADRG, USRP Direct Read and custom GI Crawler behaviors
4. MORE Data Model enhancements (see EAIM 2009, Modeling Gridded Data Whitepaper)
5. New Styplized Web Client
6. Apollo Platform Product included out of the box!
7. Performance Enhancements
8. Single FlexNET Licensing for all ERDAS Software

I'm really excited about this version and getting it released to the market. Grab onto your seats folks and get ready for the ERDAS Enterprise Software Suite!!!

The Open Source Business Model

In the GI "interoperability" domain, the "chatter" regarding open source softwares really interests me. I've had the opportunity to develop upon and deliver solutions with both open source projects and commercial products.

The geospatial open source community has had success. I attribute a couple of phenomena for this:

1. Early adoption of interoperability standards and availability of functional software in the Open Source community (they were there first)
2. Slow adoption of interoperability standards by "known" software vendors (wait and see approach)
3. Mandated interoperability requirements for "government" entities (US and Europe require it now, but how?)
4. Early "success" for limited use cases in prototypes with open source softwares
5. Good "marketing" jargon

The open source communities have really done a good job at targeting and developing the "basic" GI requirements. The open source community provides a good "cartoon web map" experience, several 2.5 D globe viewers and there are some good SDK's as well, GeoTools, GDAL and PostGIS.

"Behind the scenes", there is undoubtedly a business model behind open source software...don't believe the philanthropy when you here that there isn't. The main contributors of open source software make money, unfortuantely, it' s the only means of existence in the industrial world.

So what is the Open Source Business Model? It's both services and the traditional software product model.

Service Model - with the very limited use cases available in open source, any adopter of open source must "develop" their requirements through customizations, extensions and integration with other systems. To what extent this is required is dependent on the complexity of the use case. Support for the product falls into this category as well. Taking an average developer rate of $70 x 8 hrs x 5 days = $2800/week. There's always some level of Project Management that is required as well in contracting that is traditionally "billable".

Software Product Model - again, with the limited use cases available in open source, the contributors to the project can be directly contracted to develop features. The contributor will collect the requirement and develop the capability "direct" into the open source project and delivery it. Many of the "heavy" requirements are done in this mode.

The commitment from commercial vendors to the interoperability standards has arrived, so point #2 is becoming rather a mute point.

There's a saying that really suites the current scenario..."you get what you pay for". There's a stability, reliability, quality, performance, documentation, feature velocity and progression that are inherently required of all commercial products. If you spent money on it, you expect it to work well, fast and progress with future releases. Most customers also require a long term commitment and vision with the product that assures them that it is going in the direction that meets future needs as well.

There's also an economy of scale issue here. You can produce cartoon maps in a 'free' database today and it's only going to cost 15k for the services....great, but what about tomorrow and where will that implementation be in 2 years? Are you sure that open source project will be around in 5 years? Most open source projects are extremely "fragile" because they are "driven" by a small critical core of contributors that essentially 'manage' the project.

There's undoubtedly pushback to many open source projects in Enterprise deployments from IT. They are traditionally difficult to get "approved" by IT groups. IT likes to see proven, well established products that have references, case studies and a track record before they approve it themselves. They also require "accountability" and a formal channel for support and bug fixes. IT is a primary stakeholder and a huge contributor to the decision making process for enterprise software. This again leads us into the discussion of Brand Equity.

In the end, the decision is more than pure economics, it's about meeting the users needs (today and thinking about tomorrow), having confidence that the "product" will work and be there for you in the future.

Webinar

Thanks to all who attended the ERDAS Image Manger Webinar "Fast: Catalog and Deliver Terrabytes of Imagery". I've had several requests for the Powerpoint Presentation. I've made it publicly available here:

FAST! Catalog and Deliver Terrabytes of Imagery Powerpoint

Here is the schedule of webinars that will be provided in the coming weeks:

Schedule of ERDAS Webinars

ERDAS Image Manager 1.0.1 Service Pack RELEASED!!!

It's official! The ERDAS Image Manager 1.0.1 has been released! This Service Pack addresses several bugs as well as adds some minor feature enhancements to support ongoing project work. The EIM Demo Server has also been upgraded to this version to support our web service evaluations and support of our international sales teams.

Get your evaluation username/passwords today folks!!

Introduction to the Leica Image Manager: the Business Problems...

The Leica Image Manager is an Enterprise Class software developed to solve the business problems associated with managing massive volumes of Geospatial Information (GI); with and emphasis on imagery and terrain data.

If your a business that manages large amounts of imagery or terrain or have distributed offices and complex workflows for managing this data type, the Leica Image Manager has been built for you!

Before I explain the "features" of the product and how they work, I'd like to present the business problems that are addressed by the Leica Image Manager. A business problem in this presentation is defined as any situation that constrains a user or scenario that prevents a user from accomplishing their goal in a timely manner.

1. The Data (overwhelmed) - Gridded data sources have unique business problems inherit in the digital modeling and persistence this data type. First and foremost, the data is physically massive in size compared to traditional business data. An ADS40 sensor collects 1TB of data an hour (and thats just the raw data). This phenomena of the data creates large storage requirement and application throughput requirements. This "large data" phenomena puts a high load on the system for each constituent user added to the system. Secondly, the sheer number of imagery formats is high; each proprietary in nature. The user may not have access to a geospatial application that supports the format of imagery acquired or the ability to create the data format requested of a customer. Finally, imagery and terrain data is workflow or application specific requiring a "geospatial expert" to provide the domain knowledge to produce the requested end product or "setup" the user with the capability to produce the end product.

2. The Search (where) - The volume of images and terrain datasets is massive, causing the number of datasets to be very high. The number of imagery and terrain "files" that may cover a given area may be in the thousands...tens of thousands depending on the resolution. Additionally, the data may be spread throughout the organization in databases, storage area networks and other proprietary storage mechanisms. This prevents the end user from understanding what data exists and where the data exists, or have the means to determine which data is the "best" for what they want to accomplish. If users can't easily access the data, they simply won't use it.

3. Lack of Interoperability (can't) - The proprietary and application specific nature of GI has limited the ability of organizations to share data internally and externally. This inability to share forces time consuming processes to convert data into "formats" usable by the customer. This barrier has prevented the free flowing of data throughout the business and external to customers and has "isolated" GI to a boutique skill, rather than readily accessible, easy to use and easy to integrate business data.

4. Security - although geospatial data is business critical data for most enterprises, there is an inherit lack of a standard security model in it's access and distribution. This is more apparent as the number of data sources increase and volume of data increases. The ability to secure the data becomes extremely complex just in terms of traditional data access security. This is further complicated with a requirement to extend security with spatial security features (user 1 can only see this area, or can not see this area).

5. Domain Knowledge - The requirement for some level of domain knowledge to exploit GI is required in todays application specific workflows of GI. Most organizations have some in-house GIS or Remote Sensing Department or user group. These geospatial professionals are the proxy to request and receive meaningful GI. Understanding geospatial principles should NOT be a requirement to using a GI as a business critical data product.

All of the problems stated above prohibit the GI from being a traditional business data source, free flowing throughout the enterprise, easily integrated into business logic applications and securely accessed by the business and the customers.

Welcome to the next generation of Enterprise Geospatial products.


Find, Describe, Catalog, Discover, Exploit Geospatial Information (GI)