Geospatial Solutions: from PIXIA, Luciad, and BAE Systems
This series began a year ago by examining alternatives to Google Earth Enterprise, which Google will stop supporting on March 22, 2017; it then expanded to review a wide range of tools for geospatial visualization and analysis. For this installment, I discussed their companies’ offerings with:
- Pat Ernst, Co-Founder and COO, PIXIA
- Riordon Kossen, Field Marketing Manager, Luciad NV and
- Kurt DeVenecia, Deputy Director GXP Product Development, GXP Technology Area, BAE Systems.
PIXIA has traditionally focused on data storage, access, and management, particularly with regard to very large geospatial data—including aerial and satellite imagery, full motion video, Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI), lidar, and SAR. While some may not find storing and retrieving data particularly exciting, Ernst says, “We feel that it is a very important foundation to enable the entire value chain, including analytics and knowledge generation.”
While some of its customers prefer to run their software on their own infrastructure, PIXIA can provide a data hosting and management service or run it in something like Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its Kiosk product, part of its HiPER LOOK family of products, can also generate deployable drives that serve disconnected users. “It allows users to take a lot of data that is under management and tailor it to these disconnected drive servers,” says Ernst. They can be on commodity external hard drives, all the way down to microSD cards, and access the data through a local Web services call that does not require Internet connectivity.