The GEOINT Symposium, the nation’s largest gathering of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) professionals, is the premier annual meeting of GEOINT practitioners, stakeholders, government leaders, and their industry partners. The 2019 event in San Antonio earlier this month was a fantastic opportunity for us to engage with our customers and thought-leaders, and to share with them the news that LizardTech and Extensis have combined into one company, as Extensis. This merger allows us to bring more offerings to the community, not just for imagery and LiDAR compression and delivery systems, but for enterprise digital asset management, as well.
The theme of this year’s symposium was, “Human Machine Teaming and Innovation Yield Mission Success.” Recent advances in sensor platform development and deployment have exponentially increased the volume and richness of geospatial data collected and available to professionals worldwide. In many cases, the volume of data has outstripped the ability of analysts to digest, synthesize, and exploit the information – necessitating the requirement to turn recent advances in data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning into a force-multiplier for data preparation and analysis.
And the amount of data is only going to increase. According to the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs’ Index of Objects Launched into Outer Space, there were 4,987 satellites orbiting the Earth in January 2019. This was an increase of 2.68% over 2018, and more satellites are planned for launch later this year. Some analysts expect the LiDAR market will reach $4.5 billion by 2022, with the largest growth area found in airborne and UAV (drone) sensors and collection. Moreover, the drone services market expects to grow from $4.4 billion in 2018 to $63.6 billion in 2025, with the largest proportion being aerial photography and remote sensing.
Overall, it is clear that the amount of geospatial intelligence data is moving solely in one direction – up. The question now is, how will you get the most out of it? Extensis’ industry-leading solutions for data compression, digital asset management, and data delivery help you to maximize the value of your data by making it more accessible and exploitable to your analysts and other users. Our state-of-the-art MrSID compression in GeoExpress provides dramatic file size reduction while preserving data quality, resulting in easily shareable data across your enterprise and down to remote teams.
Of course, once you have the data you need to manage it. Extensis Portfolio brings powerful digital asset management capabilities to your organization, making data more discoverable and useable. Imagery, point clouds, photographs, videos, office files, Portfolio will index and catalog all of them, and brings with it powerful metadata search tools to make sure you find what you need, when you need it. Robust role-based user access controls ensure confidence in data stewardship.
Finally, with the entire planet imaged multiple times each day, your data holdings may be full-to-bursting with high-resolution imagery and LiDAR. Express Server is perfect for serving out very large coverage areas of compressed imagery and LiDAR, especially to users in bandwidth-limited situations. Leveraging our compression technology, Express Server is optimal for the rapid delivery and display of state and countrywide datasets over WMS.
We are all about connecting users with their digital assets. With all of the data currently available to geospatial intelligence professionals, data management and delivery systems are imperative to enabling data analysis. After all, you need to store, organize, and deliver the data before it can be exploited. The uniting of Extensis and LizardTech as one company provides our customers with industry-proven solutions to get data to those who need it at the speed of need.
See you next year at the 2020 GEOINT Symposium in Tampa, FL!
Jeffrey Stewart – Technical Account Manager
