This series began a year ago by examining alternatives to\u00a0Google 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\u2019 offerings with:<\/p>\n
PIXIA has traditionally focused on data storage, access, and management, particularly with regard to very large geospatial data\u2014including 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, \u201cWe feel that it is a very important foundation to enable the entire value chain, including analytics and knowledge generation.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cIt allows users to take a lot of data that is under management and tailor it to these disconnected drive servers,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n