Rachel Olney, Founder & CEO, Geosite talks to Ananyaa Narain, Geospatial World about the hiccups for organizations in integrating geospatial technology, how Geosite helps them overcome these barriers, and the direction of the market.
The academic study of geographic and spatial relationships has been around since the mid-20th century. However, the ‘steam engine moment’ for geospatial technology came in the early 1990s with rise in computing power that saw an explosion of adoption of the technology in government, academic community, and commercial companies. With the Fourth Industrial Revolution ongoing, the demand for geospatial data and analytics has only bourgeoned.
Rachel Olney is the ideal person to speak about integration of geospatial technology in organizations. And why not, as she holds a PhD in mechanical engineering, has done her dissertation work on how large bureaucratic and hierarchical organizations bring in new technologies (specifically on the U.S. Department of Defense and the intelligence community), and has profound experience in scrutinizing all of the ways in which teams were or weren’t succeeding at integrating new modern technology in complex industries.
Geosite enables customers to leverage spatial data for more rapid and accurate planning and operations by providing an enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. “Geosite is a platform and data engine that enables users to access and leverage geospatial data in their day-to-day operations from underwriting natural disaster risk and conducting search and rescue to monitoring remote energy and utilities assets. Geosite’s SaaS solution is built upon 3 core pillars: Unparalleled access to a robust geospatial data marketplace, dynamic data fusion delivering real time fit-for-purpose data layers, and an intuitive platform built for non-geospatial users that seamlessly integrates into current operational and business intelligence solutions” said Olney elaborating on Geosite’s work.
Olney was studying the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and sensor platforms that were being used on satellites and drones, among other things, when she recognized the gap in the industry — spatial data is being generated at an unprecedented scale, but large organizations without geospatial engineering at their core are struggling to utilize it.
A new business model
“Geosite started in defense. At the time I launched the company, I was doing this research on the Department of Defense (DoD) and the intelligence community and how they were adopting technology. Even though the US government is a massive part of the geospatial market — (75% or something of satellite imagery is purchased by them) they even have the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) — the DoD struggles to leverage spatial data. So here’s an organization that is massively resourced to leverage spatial data and even they struggle,” said Olney on how the company’s journey began.
“Our first ever contract was with Special Operations Command. It was about how to bring satellite imagery from lots of different commercial sources. The pipeline of available data is not seamlessly flowing from the NRO and NGA. How do we get it down to a non-geospatial end user? Often we over mystify and complicate serving of spatial data. They didn’t need a GeoTIFF of complex layers of shape files and rasters. They just needed a visual representation of the data. We started there,” added Olney.
Geosite then diversified into the energy industry, working on methane and other greenhouse gas emissions for upstream oil and gas. Currently, it is also involved with logistics and supply chain application besides infrastructure or asset management. In 2021, the company extended its reach to insurance, where they are rapidly growing to become the ubiquitous geospatial engine for the market.
Collaborative workflows
Traditional legacy geospatial software has a major limitation; not everybody can use them. “It has been one of the major challenges for geospatial analytics companies because they are able to come up with these extraordinary insights about what’s happening anywhere on the planet. But actually getting that insight into the workflow and into the hands of the person who needs it when they have to make a decision with that information is very hard,” opined Olney.
Geosite’s business model is very compatible with collaborative workflows. Olney said, “There’s so much spatial data out there and there are so many analytics companies doing brilliant things. We are not going to do either of those because we made that very conscious decision to stay out of producing and analyzing data. It means that we partner seamlessly with every single data and analytics provider. We are data and model agnostic.”
She spoke of the recent partnership with Carahsoft, which would give Geosite access to a broader pool of customers, easier contracting, and imbue more flexibility in the company thanks to the Carahsoft’s domain experience.
Impact of innovations
Olney lists drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as an innovation that could impact Geosite’s business in terms of remote sensing owing to the rapidly increasing distance they are able to cover, the autonomy they bring, their ability to overcome atmospheric distortion that plague satellites, and the ability to capture with much higher resolution. “The combination of in situ sensors with remote sensing will be really fascinating. Sensor fusion and models being able to feed off each other, especially for detection of greenhouse gases, is going to be extraordinary. With our work with methane emissions, it’s always a combination of ground sensors and remote sensing data,” Olney added.
Speaking on disruptive models, she said, “I think that things will become more fragmented because it will make sense for very large organizations to actually produce their own spatial data then either buy or create their own analytics. So, I think the rise of proprietary spatial data will be enormous. Especially if you look at large scale industrial applications, a lot of those companies are buying their own drones. That, combined with the advances in drone technology, makes me think that it’s going to become financially viable for large organizations to actually do their own data collection, or at least contract to do their own data collections rather than buying data that is accessible to everybody.”
On Geosite’s handsome returns, Olney said, “Our general trend, from last year to this year, and this year to next year is a revenue growth of about three x.” She sees the utilities sector, including subsurface infrastructure, as one of the playing fields where Geosite would likely foray into in the next five years.
Challenges and solutions for nascent geospatial markets
In implementing geospatial tools or technologies, governments often have little idea where to begin or how to begin. “As geospatial technologists, we expect that people just understand things that are basic to our industry, but most people — maybe 99.9% of the population — have no intuition for feasibility when it comes to what you can do with spatial data,” Olney said, characterizing the gaps in understanding that will lead to spatial data consumption.
“What are the things everybody actually needs? How do you get them all aligned? What’s actually feasible? Then, what’s actually economic to solve? If you can get all those to align then it’s a project that you can actually push forward and everybody can come along on that,” she concluded.
