As we’ve covered throughout the last few days, geospatial professionals from around the world descended upon Stuttgart, Germany last week for the annual Intergeo conference and exhibition. (Read our broad takeaways from the event here.) As one of the premier geospatial events on the calendar every year, many of the largest companies in the industry bring their teams to meet new and existing customers, with many of these companies also unveiling new products and technologies. We’ve covered a few of these releases already at Geo Week News, including those from Emesent, RIEGL, Trimble, and NavVis.
Esri is a company that in many ways bucks that trend. It’s not that the leading GIS company doesn’t make new releases, nor that they don’t have a presence at Intergeo. They do update their offerings, and they had a substantial presence at the event last week. However, there wasn’t a single release that was the focus of their booth, but rather an air of what they can add to industry professionals as a whole. At the show, Geo Week News spoke with Dr. Kate Fickas, Esri’s Director of Imagery and Remote Sensing Solutions, about what the company was focusing on at this year’s Intergeo.
As Dr. Fickas tells Geo Week News, Esri’s booth is a good representation of the company’s place in the industry, with separate sections for all different types of data used within the industry.
She said, “What you’ll see around the booth is what Esri represents. We have a lot of different capabilities, but we try to stay away from products and try to steer towards solutions. If you look behind you, you have 3D, GIS, domain management, etc., but to do any of these really cool things and use the new technologies that we’re talking about, you really need a system where you don’t have to be modular, and it all exists in one.”
That is the message they were trying to pass along to visitors to their booth throughout the week, noting that Esri exists to help contextualize and enhance the work they are already doing. Digital twins were one of the big discussion points of the show, for example, and Dr. Fickas notes that while there is value in these tools – and indeed, Esri does have a digital twin solution – they “don’t necessarily mean much without the context of GIS.”
Our conversation also touched on the growing importance and acceptance within the industry around cooperation and collaboration. Dr. Fickas tells Geo Week News that they are starting to see a “shift” in focus for companies in the industry, going from “business to business, selling technology to technology, to now more business to business to customer.” In other words, there is a recognition that the industry is more powerful as a collaborative community. To that point, she notes that Esri has almost as many partner organizations as it does employees within the company.
Overall, Esri’s presence at Intergeo was all about a shifting in attitudes around the industry, and how the sector is stronger when companies collaborate with their own expertise rather than trying to be great at everything.
She said, “[GIS and imagery] diverged in a way that GIS went very practical, and remote sensing went very academic and research-based. Now, with this boom of commercial imagery and commercial satellites coming on board, they’ve had to come back together.”
