Geospatial Analysis: Tasks vs Markets

Here’s an interesting departure from our regular technical talk with thoughts on what geospatial users and markets look like.  I know we all have different perspectives on this, and this is highly subjective, but I thought it would be worth sharing mine.

Clearly we can draw some broad strokes between markets such as environmental, defense, agriculture, coastal, forestry, mining, etc. etc.  As software providers, we strive to build solutions to help solve the problems people have in their respective domains.  However, it is very clear that there are major overlaps between domains.  A person in coastal studies could clearly be interested in environmental impacts as well as hazard mitigation and resource extraction.  As a software provider, it’s a challenge to create solutions targeted to a domain because of the overlap.  So, we like to take the approach of helping people solve their tasks.

Across geospatial domains people do need to be able to monitor and quantify change – whether it be for military intelligence or for environmental diagnostics.  Similarly, people need to have robust land cover analysis for mapping and further geospatial analysis in platforms like Arc.  Image scientists would want accurate reflectance measurements for material identification, albedo measurement, and myriad other tasks.  Creating these “atomic” tools allows us to help a wide array of users across many industries to extract information from imagery to be used in the larger scope of solving their overall problems.

That being said, we love to hear from our users in how we can better help and add value to their processes, so don’t be shy.