Breaking Down Geospatial Data Silos with Alexander Fischer (Leica)& Mitchell McPherson (12D Synergy)

Okay. >> Um, so yeah, what we want to talk to you about today is um, I guess one of the inefficiencies that we're seeing in the industry um, at the moment and I think a lot of your IT um, uh, type of roles in geospatial will talk about the size of your data and the inefficiencies there. Um what I come across a lot is the inefficiencies that often happen around moving that data and managing that data and how do we collaborate with that information when there are multiple silos in projects and and geospatial consultants consulting firms um and how can we improve those inefficiencies? How can we make these silos break down? How we share information with each other? you know data going from a instrument in the field up to the cloud down to a C drive up to a different cloud solution a lot of those are are taking quite um creating quite a lot of inefficiencies and that's what we want to talk about today we'll talk a little bit of history about 12D synergy and why I'm passionate about that topic and then we'll talk about some of the solutions that we are finding with partners in the industry um and I'll hand over to Alex and he'll be able to talk you through Geocloud and what we do with Geocloud and and what Geocloud does with the Hexagon fleet um with Leica Goss uh Geio Systems. Um myself, my name is Mitch McFersonen. Um the global sales manager or VP of growth at 12D Synergy. If you want to connect with me, you can there. Um over the last around nine years I've been helping uh surveying firms uh geospatial consultants and design uh engineering consultants mainly around Australasia help manage their data in a more efficient way. Um for 12D Synergy, it all started in Christ Church um back in 2011. There was a huge earthquake there and every piece of infrastructure, subsurface, roads, uh rail, all needed to be replaced essentially and they formed this um or joint venture is a is a is an understatement. a massive alliance of uh almost all hands on deck across New Zealand and a lot of Australia to rebuild all of this infrastructure and what we found is in this experience was uh surveying and geospatial information is really hard to manage. It's it's not easy. It has complexities and our founders Joel Gregory our CEO and Richard Stully our CTO were invited into that conversation to talk about a solution that could manage this really technical information because we all know of tools like projectwise construction cloud procore we all know about these a connectors in the world a lot of them focus on managing a drawing managing the references. But what they don't talk about is databases of information, which is what geospatial information a lot of the time is. Um if we look at what sort of um information or tools that you might use uh on a project or delivery of that scale is um a range of tools around kind of the design area civil 3D open roads 12D model and then the um conversion of that to deliverables and drawings through CAD processes AutoCAD bricks CAD MicroStation and a lot of those tools I just talked about manage those really well but the delivery of this project also involved a whole range of surveying and water tools that operate on those um databases that we needed to resolve as well. And so that's what the tool that was set out to go and solve. Hey, can you go and uh make a product that we can deliver this project and collaborate on with? And that's why 12D Synergy was born. That's our genesis story, I guess. And what we've found is that once that alliance broke up, we had a tool that these small geospatial businesses would be able to take home with them and say, "Look, we we might only have 20 staff versus the project delivery team had about 450, I think, on the on the project in in that surveying space." But they wanted to bring this home because they saw it as a really good geospatial business management tool. And that's because it focuses on one agnostic information. It's not just about can you manage um the survey data. It's also what survey data is it like a is it uh Leica infinity is it Trimble Business Center what about the field software what about 12D model 12D field which are it's a really popular um product that's used in Australia and so what we came out with a product that has these four core pillars correspondence management how do we deliver what we've actually finished with and I'd say that the correspondence management and the information management and the model and drawing production management you're all familiar with tools that can do that and what we brought into that was a geospatial manage data management platform. How does that tie into the rest of the delivery of the project? We'll get to that in a moment. I'll focus quickly on that geospatial data management. So those data sets are a folder of files. They're they're not an individual file. They're complex. They reference each other. They have multiple objects in them. You might be extracting line work, doing feature extraction. You might be doing adjustments from the capture in the field before it's processed and brought into some drawing production platforms. How do we manage that? How can we manage that in a system where information is structured so hard to manage? So that's what we've done is we've looked at this these database and say how can we treat them essentially as a as a single item and still deliver this system in a way that uh is is efficient. So what we do is we actually allow you to check out the entire database and 12D synergy is smart enough to look into Lyra Infinity or Trimble Business Center or Carlson all those likes and say these are this is what's actually changed deliver that work on it locally give you the full power of your local machine to process that information because a lot of these tools it's big data and big data in a limited environment causes the software to crash. What we're allowing you to do is the full power of the local machine. Therefore, the full power of that software, the authoring software as well. So, Leica Infinity operates at its full capacity, identify the change, and only transfer the changes back, limiting the data that you push down the pipe. So, we've got a platform here that allows you to efficiently manage and limit the information that you're moving around. And that's what this is really all about is finding industry solutions that improve efficiencies and allow us to deliver information or the project I should say in a more efficient way. And this is a slide I like to refer to. We did this at Hexagon Live recently um and it just goes through the different industries and the efficiency gains that they've seen um since the uh turn of the millennia essentially from 2002. And this is Australian data, but I think it rings true around the world is that the scope of what we're expected to deliver on a construction job is making us more inefficient. It is making the asset owner more efficient because they've got the information that they need to maintain that asset for longer, but that comes with some compliance things that we need to deliver. There's also some low technology adoption that hurts um the the the efficiency growth. We like to get, you know, stick to what we know and therefore that lag continues on. So you can see, you know, I'm I'm from a very rural town. It's very proud to see agriculture up there at 91% efficiency growth, but the industry I work in at minus 8.4% 4% which is very much a concern with the amount of technology we've adopted recently which brings into those fragmented ecosystems which is one of the big issues that we see is happening in the efficiency as well that we can control the client requirements are hard to control. We can look at efficient ways to deliver that. How do we manage attributes more efficiently in the model? How do we manage the suitability codes and approval processes in the CDE? We can look at those sorts of things but um the fragmented ecosystem is something that we can really look at and that's why we've come to the industry with CDE connect. So we've taken our CDA and said okay we're a CDA it's great to um provide an information management platform but for the for for for best practice in industry you not I might not be have the solution that you need for the whole project. what can we do to help you deliver a more efficient project? So, we look at our competitors and we look at us and we say, well, those guys have a tool that's very efficient at managing this sort of information. We have a tool that's very efficient at managing that information. And if you go back before to all the authoring tools that are on a project in a project delivery team, you'll see that I often say the authoring tools native platform is often the most efficient place to manage that data. So what CDE connect is really about is saying there's a whole heap of CDE for information exchange that we can work with. There's ARGS, QGS, FME, these GIS tools that we're working with. And there's some other tools that manage the project commercially that we tie into for the sake of making our CDE work more efficiently. But what I'm really talking about here is the pointer doesn't really show up on that screen. Um is the CDE information exchange. you've got multiple CDEs on your project. How can we use cloud platforms and let the cloud platforms do the heavy lifting of exchanging information and breaking down silos? And that's what CDE connects really about. Great example of this is the um ACC one that we see a lot. ACC uh Revit is best managed in ACC. It allows for its work sharing and collaboration to work within the platform. But ACC doesn't provide a lot of benefit around like a infiniti trimble business center bricks CAD civil 3D 12D model. Um we are we we provide a platform that does that really well. So what some customers of ours have done is said I want to use both on the plat both on the in the industry but how do I connect them? So CDE connects about saying you might have these silos and we're going to help break them down. We're going to exchange files between those platforms at approval gates and carry the metadata with them, which is really important. If you're working on an ISO 19650 compliant project, you need to carry that suitability code. You also want to carry metadata. Who changed that file? Who approved that file? What version of that file is there? So although you're running multiple CDEs on the project, you're running one ecosystem. And that's what that's really all about. Now, we did this because it was a great way to break down the silos between CDEs, but naturally most of the customers I work with are surveyors. How do we break down those barriers for field to office and office to field? So, you could go through and you could write an integration for every field authoring software there is and you could spend forever supporting that and doing that. Or you could go to some of these um key providers of these types of tools like Hexagon and say, "Hey, Hexagon, I know you have a platform that talks to your your your uh instruments in the field. Could we tap into that, use that as a conduit to get office to field, field to office collaboration happening and use CDE connect as a platform to allow the guys in the office using 12D synergy as an ISO 19650 hub to then get data out to the field to someone maybe using a CS20. they might be using a TS20 uh that's just been announced as well out in the field and getting that data to and from 12D synergy in a controlled mannered way in an efficient way um with uh the the office processing still being managed in in 12D synergy. So using that as an example that's what we did with like a geocloud we connected them together and allowed that information to exchange. So what is um hexagon geocloud? Sorry, I called it like a geocloud. Hexagon geocloud. Well, I'll hand over to my friend Alex from Hexagon. He's the head of cloud services there and he can discuss what they've been doing there and how we can improve data from the CDE in the project out to a cloud service uh with the connection in the field. >> Thanks, >> Perfect. All right. Yeah. Welcome everybody also from my side and Mitch. Thanks again for doing this co- presentation for dedicating a couple of minutes also for myself. So um let's see if this works. I really I really forgot wearing those headphones. So I don't know what you were talking about all the connection now. Um but um yeah I want to talk now a little bit about geocloud drive from hexagon geosystems. That's me. So I'm in charge of cloud services now. So we started uh two years ago to come up with the first cloud service of um hexagon geocloud drive and that's the one I want to showcase now in the next couple of minutes. Of course, we have seen uh all the years now in our experience um for surveyors that we needed our own ecosystem, right? How do we bring data from the field to the office through a cloud service so far people used FTPs um used emails, used USB drives and you can imagine um there are more and more security constraints coming up and therefore we decided we come up with our own service. Um the name is geocloud drive. is a secure cloud storage and data exchange um service for surveying and construction professionals. Um it really ensures that your data is always up to date. So there is no need anymore when you're outside, when you stake out, when you measure new data. There is no need anymore to do a physical delivery into the office anymore. Everything runs through a cloud service, right? And it's no longer an FTP or something where you just send data from A to B uh like an email. It's really a cloud service where where you can collaborate. Yeah, I tell you in my last slide then the reason why we are here together, why we have this partnership, right? It's super important to have the collaboration with 12 synergy. It really works together now. That's the reason I want to show you now um in the next couple of slides geocloud drive and in the end I show you also a little bit the reason why we're doing this. This little slide here gives you an overview what we're doing. It's quite simple to explain. Um we have on the left side the field software portfolio. Um yeah the laser pointer doesn't work too much. Geocloud drive is something that is completely integrated in our field software on the left side. So this can be done with captivate with icon but also expad from geomax is now fully integrated now and you see we can uh address now a couple of hardware devices in our whole geio systems portfolio. Um in the middle we have geocloud drive hosted on AWS. Basically here we have the data sync and on the right side we have the office portfolio. So what you see is here a screenshot of like infinitity. Of course infinity has integrated geocloud drive. But we don't stop here. We have a little tool. It's free of charge. You have to download it. It's called the desktop application and it will be installed on your Windows 10 11 system and this gives you cloud drive basically in all office software you run on your PC. Right? There is nothing to do. No integration needed no SDK. So all the data you have in TIC cloud drive will be then available in your office software of choice. A little video here how this works. Very simple. That's infin that's a captivate on a controller. We have here a little chop some line work some points you have measured. Now we want to send it over to the cloud. You flip the project. You just say upload to geocloud drive. You select a folder in the cloud. You hit the button and it's already uploaded. Right? So it's super simple integrated. There is no need for any extra tools. I think the integration here is is absolutely important. Um I show you also in a very small video now how this looks like in infinity. How the integration looks like back in the office, right? You want to have this data we have just uploaded back in infinitity. So here we hit import. We select the geocloud drive. Here you see the job we just uploaded. We say import. It takes a few moments depending on the size of the project and it will be in infinity and that's all the way right. It's simple. It's yeah um I think we we really address here a couple of values. Um we solve a couple of problems of the customer side and we of course continue to enrich this service. A few arguments what is what is helpful in this service here for our customers. Um of course we have an enhanced uh workflow efficiency. It's a real time data transfer. Yeah, more or less in real time. You hit the button, it's downloaded, it will be in the project on the fly. And it really eliminates now this manual um data delivery. Uh think about security. So we have a lot of customers now um and USB drives are really banned now. It's no longer allowed. They have to remove it. They need a cloud service now. So it's much more secure. It's on AWS hosted on a server for Europe in Ireland. When you're a customer in the US, we have also um servers in in the US. We have advanced encryption and we have a lot of regular penetration tests. In terms of security, that's super important for us from customers even who to do penetration tests here to have specific uh security. It's real collaboration as said you can share data among your colleagues. You can share data also with externals. That's not a problem. Um think also about the costs. Um we try to make it really affordable. Um the user model is per user. You can enhance users. If your company is growing, you can reduce users. That's all no problem. You're really flexible on those kind of things. Um super important as said is a full integration. So within like a geio systems, geocloud drive is basically basically now in every field software available. If you have thirdparty software also, no problem. We have SDKs to really integrate it into thirdparty software as well. I talked already about Windows software with this little app that you can download and get them data on the fly into your Windows software. And I said it's user centric user base. So you pay per user and and and storage. My last slide already and this brings me back why we are here together. So a little video here. Um that's a portfolio of like a system. It's pretty wide, right? We have total stations here. We have controllers. We have captivate. We have icon. We have levels. We have distors and so on. And you can imagine we are producing a lot a lot of data. And this must all play together, right? And therefore we generated geocloud drive. But we don't stop here and we need partners. We need strong partners like 12D synergy providing additional functionality here. Also 12 synergy is is a local champion in various areas. Right? That's also something we should not forget. So for us it's absolutely needed to have strong players and therefore we um we work together on a cloud-tocloud synchronization right. So uh geocloud drive and 12D synergy is now seamlessly really playing together in syncing here. If there is any information needed I know we have only a couple of minutes now then feel free also to address us. We give you also a step-by-step guide how this works and Mitch can also of course uh tell more details about those kind of things. Yeah. So I'm really looking forward to do additional things. maybe one sorry this is really my last slide now um there is more to come so feel free come to our hexagon booth it's one level up and um we have a second service now um introduced it's called geocloud fleet this is no longer about data it's all about your sensors yeah a fleet management and theft deterrent storage so pretty interesting with the brand new total stations the TS20 so if you're interested feel free to come up and Yeah.