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Standards help CubeWerx level the competitive playing field
When Federal Express Chief Executive Officer Fred Smith founded his overnight courier company in the 1970s, he devised a hub-and-spoke distribution system. Rather than fly cargo directly from originating city to destination city, he first routed it through a distribution centre in Memphis, Tennessee, even if that detour added hundreds of miles to a package's journey.
Although the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, Smith realized that it isn't necessarily the most efficient route. If each city had to coordinate direct transportation with every other city, distribution costs would soar, and the system would bog down in complexity.
Working from the same geospatial page
Edric Keighan, president of CubeWerx, saw opportunities to exploit a similar business model in the geospatial data world. Headquartered in Gatineau, Quebec, CubeWerx develops database products that enable organizations such as satellite-imagery companies to store, manage, and distribute massive volumes of geospatial data.
When CubeWerx started in 1996, if the company wanted to integrate its products with those of another vendor (and hence offer customers more value), the two companies had to work together to iron out the technical and legal hurdles. For instance, perhaps another company offered a proprietary chart-making product that relied on accessing information in databases. To make their products compatible, CubeWerx and this company would have had to enter a partnership and then spend time and money integrating their technologies.
"In the past, I would have had to contact this company, find the right decision maker, and convince this person that integrating our two products would serve both our companies' interests," says Mr. Keighan. "They would have had to grant us access to their proprietary interface if our two products were to work together. Consequently, organizations shied away from collaborating because of the high costs and effort."
Hand-in-glove product integration
Those days, however, are fading fast. CubeWerx started working with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in 1998 to develop web mapping standards. Today, CubeWerx and hundreds of other geospatial data companies around the world rely on OGC standards to seamlessly integrate their geospatial products and applications.
For instance, now if another vendor develops an OGC-compliant application that enables users to access data and view maps on a screen, CubeWerx can provide the back-end map-server portion of this solution without even talking to the other company. In a way, the OGC standards act like FedEx's Memphis distribution centre, removing the need for each party to set up a unique–and costly–transaction with every other party.
"Nowadays, applications vendors can all conduct their work in parallel," says Mr. Keighan. "All the effort that vendors such as CubeWerx used to devote to building one-to-one relationships is no longer needed."
Moreover, CubeWerx recognized that widespread adoption of standards would allow the company to compete better against larger and more deep-pocketed counterparts. "Small companies such as ours have to continually prove to prospective customers that our products are as good as or better than the competition's," says Mr. Keighan. "Yet we don't have the marketing budgets of the bigger companies. The best way for us to create momentum for ourselves was to push for open standards."
Geospatial data users also inherit many advantages from open standards: they have a better selection of products, they don't have to tie themselves to a single vendor, and they can more easily find applications to fit specific needs.
Getting standards off the ground
When GeoConnections was created in 1998 to establish the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure, the organization sought technical advice from industry, academia, non-government organizations, and public-sector experts to draft its technology development strategy. Subsequently, GeoConnections worked extensively with international standards organizations such as ISO and the OGC, and endorsed the use of international geomatics standards.
A follow-on aspect of GeoConnections' technology strategy has been to support the development of Canadian technologies that implement and use OGC standards. Through competitive calls for projects, companies such as CubeWerx have been able to enhance their software and introduce new capabilities.
"Thanks to GeoConnections, we've been able to build better products and deliver better enhancements," says Mr. Keighan. "They've helped CubeWerx become a world and market leader in the integration, storage, and maintenance of geospatial data."
In addition, Mr. Keighan acknowledges the importance of GeoConnections in constructing the CGDI. "If we didn't have GeoConnections, developers would be focusing on their own desktops and not on the requirements of most organizations," he says. "We'd still be talking about building the CGDI rather than actually doing it."
To Mr. Keighan, it all comes down to open standards. "Whether you're a data provider, a user, or a vendor of software or services," he says, "at the end of the day, everyone benefits from open standards. They have massive ramifications for the geospatial data world."
GeoConnections is a national partnership initiative, led by Natural Resources Canada, to build the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) and to make Canada's geospatial databases, tools, and services readily accessible on-line. |