Between the Poles

Regulators encourage utilities to invest in cloud-based software

Utilities have in general not been IT innovators.  But the accelerating adoption of smart-grid technologies by utilities is resulting is driving the need for greater IT awareness and skills in the electric power industry.   Large utilities have the requisite IT skills in house.  Small utilities typically don't and outsource their IT development or adopt SaaS solutions.   Medium-sized utilities fall in between.  Now regulators appear to be ready to provide financial encouragement to push utilities to improve their IT capacity.  Cloud-based computing is perceived by regulators as providing a way to future-proof IT investment in the rapidly changing smart grid world. 

At Distributech 2017 Oracle released the results of a survey of utility industry regulators.  Oracle Utilities and Zpryme surveyed 76 utility regulatory staff and commissioners in the U.S.  What they found was that more than three quarters of the respondents believe that regulators should play some role in determining whether utilities use the cloud. 69% of U.S. regulators support capitalizing cloud-based software, which is a way to use accounting to encourage utilities to invest in cloud-based software.  A third of the regulators have a specific and comprehensive strategy for utility cloud investment.  The most significant benefit of cloud computing the respondents identified was improved flexibility.

Predictions of the future of the utility business 2015-2018

For the first time in a hundred years, the electric power utility industry is undergoing a momentous change. Distributed renewable power generation, especially solar photovoltaics (PV), is introducing competition into an industry that has been managed as regulated monopolies. Consumers with solar PV panels on their roofs are fundamentally changing the traditional utility business model. A recent report from the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) report refers to disruptive challenges that threaten to force electric power utilities to change or adapt the business model that has been in place since the first half of the 20th century.

Most utilities are in the midst of deploying smart grids, which basically amounts to applying the internet to the electric power grid to link intelligent electronic devices, sensors and grid control applications to enable data-driven decision making.  One of the most important changes driven by the implementation of smart grid is the much greater importance of location. Geospatial technology (location, geospatial data management and spatial analytics) is seen as foundational techology for the smart grid.

The other major global change in energy is the shift in energy demand from the world's advanced economies to emerging economies.   Energy demand from OECD countries has hit a plateau.  Currently China is driving world energy demand. The International Energy Agency's (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2014 projects that in the future  as demand slows from China, world energy demand will be driven by India, the Middle East, and Africa and Latin America.

Recently IDC Energy Insights released a report IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Utilities 2015 Predictions with predictions for the future of the utility business.  Some of these are startling, suggesting that the utility industry is going to experience fundamental changes in how they do business over the next few years.

New business models

IDC predicts that utilities will be looking less at generation as a source of revenue.  IDC predicts that by 2018 45% of new data traffic in utilities' control systems will originate from distributed energy resources that are not owned by the utility.

To make up for this loss of generation revenue IDC predicts that utilities will be looking for new business opportunities such as services.  Specifically, IDC predicts that utilities will derive at least 40% of their earnings from new business models by 2017.

Technology

• Cloud - By 2018 cloud services will make up half of the IT portfolio for over 60% of utilities.
• Integration - In 2015 utilities will invest over a quarter of their IT budgets on integrating new technologies with legacy enterprise systems.
• Analytics - By 2017 45% of utilities' new investment in analytics will be used in operations and maintenance of plant and network infrastructure.
• Mobility - 60% of utilities will focus on transitioning enterprise mobility to capitalize on the consumer mobility wave.
• Smart systems - By 2018 cognitive systems will penetrate utilities' customer operation to improve service and reduce costs.

Some  of the important drivers for these trends include the global redistribution of energy demand from the world's advanced to the emerging economies, the rapid emergence of cloud-based provisioning and services, increasing regulatory pressure responding to customer demand to improve energy market transparency and competitiveness, cross-industry competition for technical, especially IT skills, smart analytics, and virtual and augmented reality beginning to be applied in business.

Top 10 technology trends

In March 2014 Gartner, Inc. identified the top ten technology trends which it saw impacting the global energy and utility markets.  There is considerable overlap between IDC's business predictions and the technology trends identified by Gartner, Inc.

Social Media

Social media are beginning to be used as a customer acquisition and retention medium, as a consumer engagement channel to drive customer participation in energy efficiency programs, a source of information about outages, and as the emerging area of crowd-sourcing distributed energy resources coordination. Social media are also being used by utilities for communicating information about outages with customers.

Big Data

Smart grid will increase the quantity of data that utilities have to manage by a factor of about 10,000 according to a recent estimate.  This trend is driven by intelligent devices, sensors, social networks, and new IT and OT applications such as advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), synchrophasors, smart appliances, microgrids, advanced distribution management, remote asset monitoring, and self-healing networks.  The type of data that utilities will need to manage will change: for example, real-time data from sensors and intelligent devices including smart phones and unstructured data from social networks will play a much greater role for utilities in the future.

Mobile and Location-Aware Technology

Mobile and location-aware technology which includes hardware (laptops and smartphones), communication products (GPS-based navigation, routing and tracking technologies), social networks (Twitter,Facebook and others) and services (WiFi, satellites, and packet switched networks) are transforming all industries.  Utilities for the most part have been slow to adopt consumer mobile technology, but  this is changing.

Cloud Computing

Acccording to Gartner, areas such as smart meter, big data analytics, demand response coordination and GIS are driving utilities to adopt cloud-based solutions.  Early adopters of cloud technologies include small utilities with limited in-house IT skills and budgets, organizations which provide application and data services to multiple utilities, such as cooperative associations and transmission system operators,  and investor-owned utilities (IoUs) conducting short-term smart grid pilots.

Sensor Technology

Sensors, which are being applied extensively throughout the entire supply, transmission and distribution domains of utilities, provide a stream of real-time information from which a real-time state of the grid can be derived.

IT and OT Convergence

Virtually all new technology projects in utilities will require a combination of IT and OT investment and planning, such as AMI or advanced distribution management systems (ADMSs).  This will be a challenge for many utilities, especially smaller ones, which don't have in-house IT skills.

Advanced Metering Infrastructure

AMI provides a communication backbone aimed at improving distribution asset utilization and facilitating consumer inclusion in energy markets.

Internet of Things

Sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects are linked through wired and wireless networks, using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet.  When intelligent objects can both sense the environment and communicate, they become tools for understanding utility grids and responding to changes in near real-time.  Following McKinsey there are two key benefits arising from the Internet of Things for utilities

• Enhanced situational awareness - acheiving real-time awareness of physical environment, in this case, the grid
• Sensor-driven decision analytics - assisting human decision making through deep analysis and data visualization

Asset performance management

Traditional asset management approaches are too limiting for today’s performance-based, data-driven utility environment. Asset performance management solutions need to deliver real-time equipment performance, reliability, maintenance and decision support for effective resource management so that operations and maintenance teams are empowered with real-time decision support information, providing the right information to the right people at the right time and in the right context.  The result is improved operational performance and better asset availability and utilization.

Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics

Analytics will become essential as the volume of data generated by intelligent devices and sensors, mobile devices (the Internet of Things) and social media increases and huge pools of structured and unstructured data need to be analyzed to extract actionable information.  Analytics will become embedded everywhere, often invisibly.

Are APIs copyrightable ?

Last week U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington DC ruled that Oracle can copyright application programming interfaces (APIs) for the Java programming language.  In a unanimous ruling the appeals court held that a district judge in California erred in 2012 by declaring that the APIs were simply a function or an idea, and not an expression subject to copyright protection.  The appeals court found instead that, despite the fact Google had written its own code to implement the software, it had infringed copyright by using Oracle’s headers (declarations).  According to one of Oracle's lawyers "Google copied 7,000 lines of code and the structure and organization of whole packages of highly creative software. To say that this is protected is not the same as saying that anything that might loosely be called an API is protectable under copyright law."

ESRI UC: 3D and other themes of this year's conference

According to Jack Dangermond who led the plenary sessions on the first day,  this year in San Diego 12000 people from 130 countries were in San Diego for the 33rd Esri International User Conference.

I gravitated primarily to the utility sessions.  According to Bill Meehan, who is responsible for ESRI's utility business, there were 750 utility folks at this year's UC.

GIS is everywhere

GIS is being used in diveerse areas including environmental monitoring, climate change, permafrost melting, sea level rise, agriculture, water resources, aquaculture, pollution remediation, energy resources management, land information systems, urban design, utility network management, wasteshed modeling, utility pole inspection, sewer rehabilitation, port management, indoor GIS, iInsurance risk management, health-related mapping, law enforcement, mapping where space debris might fall, flood risk mapping, storm tracking and damage assessment,  geodesign, crowdsourcing for collecting a variety of data, interoperabilty, citizen engagement, government transparency, cartography, geology and mining, automatic generalization of different scale maps, story maps, portals for infrastructure, and open data, to mention just a few of the things that were singled out in the plenary session. 

Some of the areas that were singled out  for special recognition were

• Special Achievements in GIS award went to the Dartmouth Atlas for showing geographically how outcomes and the cost of medical procedures varies depending on location across the U.S. 
• The Hong Kong Lands Department received the Enterprise GIS award for their land management system which they started in the 1990's and is now in its second generation. 
• Tbe President's Award went to Direct Relief which distributes different types of equipment to people around the globe in need with 99% efficiency according to Forbes.

Themes

The theme of this UC was GIS transforming our world, not only changing the physical world as we know it, but also changing our perception of the world and how GIS has and will fundamentally help us collectively build a better future.  A classic example that has impacted everyone on the planet is GPS or more generally GNSS.   As a number of speakers including Dangermond said we are never lost any more and that is fundamental change to how we perceive the world.

Some of the major themes that emerged at this UC are common to many software and service providers in the IT sector, but some of these are new or unique to ESRI. 

Climate change

We are facing serious global challenges, in particular climate change, which both at the Geodesign Summit and at this UC conference appears to be a personal challenge for Dangermond who sees GIS as contributing in major way in creating a more sustainable future.  He sees GIS helping to change how we think and act and how we do basic things such as design. 

GIS across the organization

A theme that was pervasive throughout the conference including in the utility sessions was the need to make GIS pervasive across the organization because 90% of the data that organizations are collecting and managing has location.  This was also true in utility sessions I attended, where the thrust is to expand the use of GIS outside of the traditional area of records management into other departments.

Vertical industry "templates"

In the utility and telecommunications sectors there is a major effort underway to create preconfigured vertical "templates" for specific vertical industries.  In the utility sector one was announced yesterday for the electric power Industry, and others are underway for gas and telecommunications.  These templates are a collection of data and tools for vertical industries and are available as open source on Github.

Web

The web was pervasive, It was hard to find a session where the theme that desktop GIS is being transformed into web GIS did not come up.  It doesn't mean that the desktop is going to go away in the near future, but sharing data, applications, and apps is being recognized as a common goal and web GIS makes this very easy to do.  This includes web portals for accessing enterprise data over the web.

Cloud

A lot of the traditonal desktop GIS capabilities are now being made available in the cloud so that all you need is an iOS or Android device or a web browser.  This is also available to large enterprises who need to keep their data on their own servers for security reasons.  Cindy Salas from Centerpoint Energy demonstrated ESRI's cloud capability but running "on premise" completely wthin Centerpoint's fire wall. 

Integration

Being able to integrate location and the spatial dimension into enterprise applications such as ERP (SAP), business intelliegence (IBM Cognos), Salesforce, MS Dynamics, and Excel spreadsheets is a new focus for ESRI.   They have already created plugins for several well-known applications.

Mobile devices

In the past when you talked about mobile in the context of utilities, you were normally dealing with Panasonic Toughbooks which could cost up to $6 000 each.  At this conference just about every application was able to run on a variety of low cost mobile devices including iOS and Android mobile devices.  One of the sessions I attended was about the National Broadband rollout in Australia where the 500 field folks who are doing 300 000 pit inspections were all equipped with iPads, which you might have thought were too fragile for pretty rough field work..  This project has been underway for something like 18 months and todate only two of the iPads have been damaged.

Big data

Spatial data volumes whether from sensors at utilities, from LIDAR scanning of transmission lines, or from earth obsevration satellited are now reckoned in terabytes.  There were sessions on spatially enabling Hadoop, SAP HANA and other big data management systems for managing these data volumes.

Real-time

In the utility track managing real-tme data from sensors on transformers, smart meters, phasors, and other devices and enabling near real-time decision making was a common theme.  A general event processing capability that can be triggered by rules has been added to the quiver to make this possible for any data stream. 

In the area of imagery, Digital Globe imagery can be accessed with 4-5 hours of acquisition.

Analytics

Big data and real-time means that we need to be able to understand what these huge volumes of data are telling us and then enable decision-making, automated or human mediated, as rapidly as possible.  If a transformer is running hot, we can't wait a week until the next service check to reconfigure the network because by then we may have reduced it projected lifetime by 10%.  There were "location analytics" sessions in most of the vertical industry sessions including utilities.

Content

Software companies like ESRI and Hexagon are now in the content busines.  And with the data beng made available in the cloud, you can access it through web GIS or desktop GIS. The data includes traditional topographic maps, digital terrain models, imagery from earth observation satellites from Digital Globe and others some of it near real-time (fr example, from Digital Globe within 4-5 hours of acqusition), demographics, and others.

Dangermond's term for this is the "living atlas" because this body of content is intended to be dynamic, real-rime and comprehensive.  The goal seems to be all the data you would need to manage the planet.

Some of the content explicitly mentioned includes

• basemaps
• community. content
• imagery
• 30 cm coverage of the US
• 60 cm coverage of Western Europe
• imagery for the middle east and asia in total covering 2/3 of the world
• health
• lifestyle
• economics
• demographics, at the zip code, county, state, and national levels
• scientific maps including environmental, energy, infrastructure, and terrain models
• landscape layers

This data is accessible to web and desktop applications and makes it very easy to do standard spatial analytical things like multi-criteria suitability or site selection mapping.  Users can also publish their own data to the cloud.

Education

This has always been a strong focus area for ESRI and from Dangermond's perspective with the challenges the world is facing, GIS professionals will be even more critical in the future.  There is focus on advancing spatial literacy to a broader audience than in the past.

LiDAR

Laser scanning is a major source of important data for the construction industry (right of way determination and construction progress monitoring), utilities (transmission vegetation management), and other industries.  ESRI has made this a focus area and there were a number of sessions devoted to managing and analyzing point cloud data.

3D

Dangermond specifically singled out 3D as a major capability area for ESRI.  There are specialized 3D products, but 3D is also being built into ESRI main stream GIS and spatial analytical products.

3D city models

At the plenary there was a demonstration of how to quickly build a 3D city model from 2D data, including extruding buildings from a 3D building footprint and height, adding textures depending on building types, and then tools for analysis such as zoning and shadow analysis and visualization including flythroughs.  These models are sharable on the cloud as web scenes requiring only a web browser (with no plugins) or iOS mobile devices.

Geodesign

At the UC ESRI is demonstrating a prototype of a product designed specifically for geodesign.

Open data

Dangermond specifically mentioned the newest national open data initiative in Peru. 

Crowdsourcing/volunteered data

There are sessions specifically on editing and manipulating OpenStreetMap data.

Sam Pitroda on harnessing technology to transform Indian society

India is projected to become the world's 5th largest economy by 2020.  The IEA estimates that India will require 600-1200 GW of new electric power generation capacity by 2050.  But 30% of India's power generation is lost to "aggregate technical and commercial" (AT&C) losses. To address this challenge, the Union Government created the India Smart Grid Task Force, chaired by Sam Pitroda, advisor to the Prime Minister.  Sam Pitroda has a reputation for making change happen.  As an advisor to a previous prime minister, Sam Pitroda spearheaded the telecom revolution in India which in 20 years transformed India from a country with 2 million phones to 900 million phones.  He is a strong believer in the power of  technology for enabling change for the benefit and betterment of society.  Today at the ESRI User Conference Pitroda reiterated this theme.

Pitroda ponted out that India is a complex country, both geographically and with respect to the diversity of its people.  Technology has been the key driver in India since 1947 when the British left.  Agriculture, telecommunications, higher education, energy, and space technologies were among the initial focus areas. India is now able to feed 1.3 billion people and send satellites into space.  20 years ago there were 2 million telephones for about 800 million people. Now there are about 900 million phones, mostly wiereless, in India as a result of the telecommunications revolution that Pitroda helped to initiate.

The challenge that India is facing is 400 million people below the poverty line. Every national policy has to take this economic pyramid into account. India is also a very young country with 550 million people under the age of 25.  These demographics means that the Indian development model has to be different from the Western model.  It is simply inconceivable that every household in India (and China) will have a a car, pay $30,000 per year for education, and $70 000 for a bypass operation as in the United States.

The primary challenges that India faces are social equity, lessening the disparity between the affluent and the poor, urban and rural, educated and uneducated, reinforcing Indian democracy, and demography - creating economic opportunities for the young. 

In Pitroda's view the key to meeting these challenges is information.  People are poor because of a lack of information.  Access to information is essential for making democracy work. Information is also a great leveler which helps reduce disparity.  It is also going to help provide the 15 to 20 million new jobs that India needs to create every year.

Already most Indians have access to voice communications.  The next challenge is data communications.  India and tthe US jointly developed an open platform for sharing government data that is being made available to other countries.  At a cost of about $2 billion, India has developed a Knowledge Network linking Indian universities and technical institutes.  The next step is to create a fiber optic network linking Indian cities, towns, and villages, at an estmated cost of $7 billion over the next 18 to 24 months.  The long term objective is to empower over a billion people.

A key part of the the IT platfom is developing geospatial infrastructure including data and technology.  The XI Five-Year Plan mandated the use of geospatial technology in new mission-critical projects. The objective is to provide a seamless, nationwide, geospatially-enabled database, which will serve as a platform for data sharing amongst various national government departments and state governments. 

Several years ago it was realized that just about every department has its own base map.  The Water Department, the Revenue Department, the Gas Authority all had different base maps with different boundaries.  Information is power and no one wants to share.  It was recognized that it was essential to get everyone working together to agree on one common standard base map.  It took a year and half to achieve this.  It is not easy to get 30 different states some of which have populations of 200 million to agree on common standards and this requires changing people's mindset.  From Pitroda's perspective the problem is a 19th Century mindset, 20th Century policies, and 21st Century technology.  The solution is to get the younger generation to think differently.

Pitroda's vision is that a national information infrastructure based on a common geospatial platform will help make government more transparent and accountable, reduce corruption, reduce the waste of resources, empower citizens and provide a foundation for a uniquely Indian approach to innovation and economic development that will reduce disparity and create jobs for the young Indian workforce over the next decade or two.  Based on the Indian experience with revolutionizing communications, Sam Pitroda is optimistic that access to information incorporating geospatial techology will transform Indian society.  This is an incredible vision for transforming the lives of 1.3 billion people.

The evolution of the open source software foundation

Steve Walli of the Outercurve Foundation has published a very perceptive discussion of why the phenomenon of the open source software foundation (neutral non-profit) has become so important in the free and open source software (FOSS) community.

Open source is the best software re-use strategy

Steve's fundamental premise is that liberally-licensed collaboratively developed software is the best re-use strategy.  There are a number of different ways to look at this, but the one that has stuck in my mind was the result of attending a military open source conference in Washington, DC some years ago.  The U.S. military, which is perhaps the biggest user of open source software in the world, uses FOSS because they judge it to be more secure and to have fewer bugs than proprietary software all other things being equal.  The reason most often given for this is Eric Raymond's "many eyeballs" thesis that more people seeing code reduces bugs and security problems.

Economic benefit

As I remember from the history of the development of the Apache foundation, there is often a very strong economic motivation for FOSS.  In the early days of the web, there was the opportunity for every major vendor, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, and others to develop their own http web server.  Instead IBM helped form the Apache Founation and then encouraged other major vendors to join which just about everyone did (with one important exception).   The major vendors jointly contributed to developing one web server based on the NCSA http server and found it much less expensive than if each vendor had developed its own web server.

Intellectual property rights management is what FOSS foundations do

Steve makes the case that the core capability of FOSS foundations is to manage IP - he refers to them as IP Management Machines.  He says that this was the primary motivation for the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Apache Software Foundation (AS F), OSDL/Linux, and the Eclipse Foundation.  Corporations have more stringent software intellectual property (IP) needs and. neutral non-profit FOSS foundations have proved to be a solution to this problem, providing for the IP management needs of corporations.  FOSS foundations remove the barriers to corporate engagement for FOSS projects.

For example, for all contrbutions to Eclipse projects, the contributor has to agree to a standard IP statement for every submission.  It also must be contributed through standard channels, either Bugzilla or Gerrit, either of which which provide a complete audit trail for any contribution.   

For large contributions (over 250 lines) or code from external projects, then a complete IP review is required.  This can take a  long time because the provenance of all the code is checked, the licences are checked, and the code is scanned for IP problems.  Th reason Eclipse insists that this soemwhat involved process be followed for all contributions is that it guarantees that all Eclipse code can be used legally for commercial purposes under the EPL.

Growing projects into mega projects

Steve refers to Henrik Ingo's research which I blogged about recently.  Henrik found that the largest software projects are governed by FOSS foundations.   He concluded that there appears to be a glass ceiling for single vendor projects prohibiting their growth from the Large category upwards.  Based on his research findings he recommends that companies who want their projects to become mega project should contribute these projects to a FOSS foundation.

What is a FOSS foundation ?

A FOSS foundation is a neutral (not dominated by one vendor) non-profit (but run as a business) organization that provides legal structures, business operations, and technical services to its members, most of whom are firms or individuals involved in some aspect of software development or as software users.   FOSS foundations are different from corporate open source projects like OpenSUSE, Fedora, JBoss, or MySQL in several important ways. 

• FOSS foundations are neutral which encourages participation. 
• FOSS foundations put a lot of effort into managing IP openly and cleanly because clean IP encourages adoption among the user community. 
• FOSS foundations encourage broad participation, something that it is hard for a corporate project to do.

FOSS foundations have many projects they are responsible for.  The Eclipse Foundation for example has 270 active projects.  FOSS foundations also provide technical services and infrastructure such as source code repositories, build tools, test harnesses, code signing, bug tracking,  and so on. 

For example, the Eclipse foundation has implemented a very efficient process for contributors that minimizes for the contributor and the committer the time it take to submit the code, verify that it compiles and links correctly, conduct code reviews, run standard tests, and if all that succeeds actually submit the code to the main tree on Github.

Legal structures

One of the most important services that a FOSS foundation provides is legal liability and risk management.  This includes providing and managing licenses for contributors and users, provenance tracking, and indemnification.

Strong communities

In my view one of the most important things that FOSS foundations provide is a governance structure that creates an architecture of participation.  The objective is inclusion not exclusion.  The governance structure makes it easy to join conversations and to participate in various ways based on merit.  It  also encourages and grows committers (developers who can commit code changes). 

At the Eclipse Foundation there are something like 6 million users, some of whom contribute to the Eclipse ecosystem in various ways,by configuring the IDE, extending in in various ways, developing and publishing plugins, integrating Eclipse in products, and at the highest level fixing problems and developing new modules for Eclipse project code itself.  There is a fascinating video of a presentation on what it means to be a committer by a couple of Eclipse committers at a recent EclipseCON conference in Europe.

One of the most important aspects of being an Eclipse participant is the Eclipse software development process which is part of the Eclipse governance structure. 

This development process is used by all Eclipse projects.  The key objectives of the Eclipse development process are transparency (all decisions, code, and discussions can be seen by everyone), openness (encouraging participation by making it easy to join discussions), and diversity (encouraging broad participation, encouraging as many firms and individuals as possible to particpate).

Location Intelligence Enterprise USA: Benefiting from spatial "data obesity"

Yesterday and today I've been at a conference in Chicago called Enterprise Strategies for Location Intelligence USA 2011.

Geopatial should be another data type 

For years, the geospatial industry has argued that most of IT (the number we have all heard is 80% of IT) would benefit from geolocation.  Yesterday we heard from two of the major players in enterprise business intelligence (BI) that just linking business intelligence applications to a GIS is not enough, spatial needs to be part of BI.  Xavier Lopez of Oracle and Don Campbell of IBM (Don's background is Cognos which was acquired by IBM), both made the case that geospatial needs to be an integral part of BI.

Geospatial data obesity

There is so much geospatial data these days coming from a variety of sources that one speaker used the term data obesity to describe the situation.  The challenge is no longer data acquistion but making sense from all the geospatial data we have.  An impressive example was provided by Andre Parris of Bloomberg who provide a services to investors based on monitoring on an daily, if not hourly, basis many world industries.  Bloomberg has 30,000 data sources, from whom they license only raw data.  Their objectrive is to monitor everything, especially information relating to infrastructure. For example, Bloomberg tracks every cargo vessel over 10,000 deadweight tons.  As a specific example, Bloomberg can tell you where 127 bulk tankers are, where they are heading to and whether they are carrying cargo or not.  To Bloomberg data is a cost, and Bloomberg's application Equity BMap turns it into value that Bloomberg sells as a service.

Using buses to monitor traffic flow

Another fascinating presentation was given by David Zavattero, Deputy Director of the Chicago Department of Transporation.  Chicago is the US's third most congested city.  His objective is to be able to monitor arterial traffic in Chicago to help reduce congestion.  He found a very low cost and ingenious way to do this.  Chicago Transit's 2300 buses are all equiped with GPSs that report location, speed, and other variables every 30 seconds.  He was able to use this information to estimate automobile traffic speeds for 300 miles of arterial highway in Chicago.  As a rough idea of the benefit to Chicagoans, based on this information, somewhere between 2-8% of the driving public may elect to take public transit, and 2-5% may change their route.

SaaS for Infrastructure GIS Applications in the Cloud

Last October, Gartner announced its top 10 strategic technology list for 2010.  Cloud computing was Gartner's number one choice.  Cloud computing involves server-based applications that expose services, called software-as-a-service (SaaS), that interact with a variety of clients over the web or on a private network.

At the GITA annual conference in Phoenix several weeks ago, Geovane Magalhães of CPqD, gave a very interesting presentation on the potential for software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the area of infrastructure GIS.  I blogged earlier about Project Butterfly, which is an Autodesk Labs project for enabling AutoCAD as a SaaS application over the web.

From Geovane's perspective, infrastructure GIS involves a mix of engineering design (CAD) and geospatial (GIS) activities that involve short, medium and long duration transactions and that support a variety of infrastructure-related activities in a utility or telecommunications organization including marketing, planning, Sales, engineering, construction and operations.  The planning-design-construction cycle never ends.  Existing plant has to be maintained and operated, while at the same time new infrastructure is being developed and brought on line. Typical activities include underground infrastructure locate (call-before-you-dig), maintaining network infrastructure records, designing new infrastructure for residential or commercial developments, network load forecasting and planning, financial estimation, preparing maps for and overseeing construction, managing as-builts, and preparing maps and drawings for operations people in the field.  Much of this work, and especially for large companies, is done by contractors who do the work in the field or at their own premises.  Geovane believes that SaaS is well suited for infrastructure GIS, because SaaS reduces complexity for the end user, offers very low system start up costs, supports device independence, and can provide scalability.  For these reasons, Geovane sees SaaS as well suited not only for small utility companies who may have very limited IT capacity, but also for large utilities and telcos who rely on contractors for much of their design and field work.

Geovane outlined a solution architecture that involves a database centric application based on open standards integrated in an N-tier architecture to optimize server usage and scalability.  It uses secure web services to exchange data between the SaaS server and client applications.  The server side requires enhanced performance logic to minimize network latency and optimize communications bandwidth so that client performance is similar to locally hosted infrastructure GIS applications. The application platform needs to support an industry-standard CAD/GIS front end for design such as AutoCAD Map3D as well as browser-based web clients.

Forrester Projects Worldwide Software Spending Growing by 9.7% in 2010

According to InformationWeek, Forrester,in a report entitled US And Global IT Market Outlook: Q4 2009, is forecasting that global spending on IT hardware and software will grow 8.1% in 2010, after a decline of 8.9 % in 2009.  Regionally Forrester expects Western Europe to lead the resurgence.

• Western and Central Europe 11.2%
• Canada 9.9%
• Asia Pacific 7.8%
• Latin America 7.7%
• U.S. 6.6%
• EMEA 2.4%.

Forrester expects that software will see the largest increase with worldwide spending on software growing by 9.7%.

Chrome OS Source Code Fully Open

Google has announced that the source code for Chrome OS is fully open.  Yesterday Google hosted an event about Chrome OS including demonstrations of Chrome OS.  The presentations ran on machines running Chrome OS.  According to Google, Chrome OS is about a year away from being released.

Google's perspective is that Netbooks are becoming increasingly popular, people are doing more things in their browser, and new types of devices like smart phones, e-readers, and web tablets like the new Nokia N900 are becoming widely used.

According to Google, every Chrome OS application will be a Web application, so you won't have to download and install applications.  Chrome-based netbooks will be instant on.  Turn on the power switch and the machine is on-line.  Google is eliminating the boot loader and modifying the Linux kernel to minimize loading of services at startup.  They also intend to use a verified boot process that detects whether web applications are legitimate.

Google will specify the hardware components for Chrome OS-optimized netbooks. For example, Chrome-OS optimized netbooks will have to use solid state drives.  Chrome OS will run on both ARM and x86 processors.  You won't be able to download Chrome OS onto an existing netbook.

For offline use, it looks like Google will implement something like Google Gears.