Google Earth Builder: Productizing Server Farms for Storing and Processing Geospatial Data
Google Earth Builder (GEB), which Google released last fall, enables private companies and government agencies to store and process their geospatial data on Google’s huge server farms and display it through Google Earth, Google Maps, and applications on Android phones. Like a company that buys a building much larger than it needs for its own operations and then leases some of this space, Google is productizing some of its computing capacity by licensing GEB.
Meanwhile, to maximize the benefits of this new product for their clients’ specific needs, more than a dozen Google Enterprise Partners around the world are developing custom applications that run on top of Google Earth’s public application programming interfaces (APIs). Early adopters of GEB include the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the giant Australian utility Ergon Energy, and satellite imagery company GeoEye.