Through the pandemic, our customers have increasingly become data driven. They are treating data as an asset with strategic value, not a byproduct of their operations. And consequently, they are realizing that a spatial component often provides the most pertinent and actionable insights. As these new cutting-edge technologies demonstrate meaningful gains, the growth is “up and to the right” as we like to say. We see the trajectory very steep in that direction.
Adapting to climate change
Locana stays attuned to megatrends affecting our customers. We started an initiative to establish an enterprise view to address the challenges of adapting to climate change and help our customers evolve to new needs. For major U.S. utilities, our mobile solution, Lemur, leverages vegetation management to help mitigate wildfire risk to critical infrastructure. Our integration of spatial technology into enterprise business systems allows them to better transition to greener energy sources and meet net-zero goals.
Customers are treating data as an asset with strategic value, not a byproduct of their operations
We are working with the Federal government to address wildfire risk by identifying areas of greatest exposure with tools to prioritize risk reduction actions. Internationally, we’re working with development organizations to build decision-support tools that help keep agricultural commodity value chains viable and resilient. Our geospatial technologies are evolving. They span the range from adding new innovative features to a solution — to building entirely new data platforms and tools to help characterize the problem and direct a response.
2023 is the year of AI
2023 was declared “The Year of AI” by many — and I agree. There is increasing interest from customers in this space. We see the application of machine vision for automated feature extraction at increasing scale and adaption of consumer-oriented machine learning models (both in object detection and natural language processing) to enterprise use cases.
We are excited with where OpenStreetMap (OSM) has come in terms of completeness and quality. The barrier to entry for working within OSM has been significantly lowered. We work with customers to analyze options for energy transition via microgrids, the development of new supply chains, and construction of custom routing services that meet scenarios such as directing service vehicles in post-disaster situations.
Another less visible trend is increased integration of spatial data with core business systems. Some digital transformation work we’ve done is modernizing geospatial infrastructure and introducing standard data schemes, which are poised to bear fruit in increasingly spatially-enabled industries.
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Location intelligence benefits customers
Better accuracy in location intelligence is leading to tangible benefits for our customers. With mobility solutions, we’re able to help customers direct field workers more precisely to work locations — and track and trace infrastructure components in response to regulatory requirements around safety management. We’re using increased accuracy to make our customers more efficient and responsive.
Location intelligence helps our customers adapt to the impending retirements in the utility industry by enhancing their location intelligence and core geospatial assets, extending them to the field. They are developing comprehensive location intelligence for their operations in a number of ways like building geospatial systems of record for their core assets or enriching the geographic features with real time sensors, topology, context and metadata to serve as a knowledge base to train new workers. While it is impossible to replace practical experience, location intelligence provides an effective way to mitigate the loss of experienced workers.
(Jeff Haight is the CEO of Locana. The views expressed in the article are the personal opinions of the author.)
Disclaimer: Views Expressed are Author's Own. Geospatial World May or May Not Endorse it
