I’ll be honest, this isn’t a blog post I ever thought I’d be writing but I’m excited to share this news with you.

I began my career in GIS in 2000 working on a graphic work design product for utilities tied to the arguably dominant GIS product within utilities at that time, Smallworld. My company implemented Smallworld as the system of record along with many other related systems, our own product extensions, and integrations to every other crucial system in the utility ecosystem. On a sidenote, if that playbook sounds like SSP, it’s not by mistake.

It was in those days that I met many brilliant programmers (including our own president of our utilities practice, Aaron Patterson) who had come to the US from the UK where Smallworld was based. I inevitably heard the name of Smallworld’s CTO, Peter Batty, as he was known for having established the technology as a worldwide geospatial leader as well as being the primary brain/creator behind Smallworld’s outage management system (OMS) called PowerOn.

Shortly thereafter, my career pivoted into the world of Esri for utilities and I’ve never looked back. It was a few years later and I was working at Miner & Miner (M&M) implementing the ArcFM© extension for utilities all over the country. Esri and ArcFM© had made a dent in the proverbial Smallworld armor and were well on their way to taking the market share of the domestic US utilities as well as competing effectively internationally. In October 2005, I was sitting in a pre-brief meeting for the Esri EGUG conference when a VP, exclaimed “did you hear Peter Batty just took the CTO position at Intergraph?!?” As a more junior member of the experienced industry crew, it took me a moment to register the significance of this, but I could tell it was BIG NEWS.

Peter also founded a couple of different companies including a company called Ten Sails which became the geospatial company, IQGeo, where until recently, he has served as CTO. You may have heard of IQGeo’s product created by Peter, myWorld, as it has competed in our Esri vertical and directly with SSP and 3-GIS products over the more recent years. We’ve got plenty to say about why our product lines are the clear leaders over myWorld but will save that for another post. Notably during his time at IQGeo, Peter led the competitive charge against Esri including various speaking and writing opportunities.

For a while now, Peter has felt that there is a transformational change coming in the geospatial industry in terms of how we create and maintain data, as he explains in this article (while this post is focused on telecom customers, it fully applies to utilities as well). This change will be driven by a broad range of technologies beyond the geospatial industry, including machine learning, computer vision, augmented reality, and more. He has specific ideas for products in this area, and in evaluating where he could have the most impact on the industry with this work, he felt SSP was the best place to be. Key factors included Esri’s dominant position in the marketplace and their investment in relevant technologies such as reality capture, with their recent acquisition of the SURE product line, together with SSP’s strong position in utilities and telecoms, our excellent momentum, the expertise of our team, and our willingness to invest in new ideas. Esri will continue to push toward a systemwide 3D capture of an entire utility or telecom system whereas SSP’s reality capture investment will focus on enabling utility and telecom field workers to automatically record changes to the network where and when they happen. Sound like a powerful partnership? I think so too. Want to learn more? Be sure to attend this year’s virtual SSP iLLUMINATE conference where we’ll tell you all about it.

Peter has now officially joined SSP Innovations as our Chief Research Officer (CRO) where he will work closely with our CTO, Adam Tonkin, as well as our two line of business presidents, Aaron Patterson – utilities and Dustin Sutton – telecom in support of the above initiative. With his broad industry experience, he will also support SSP’s advancement of geospatial technology within both utilities and telecom via evangelism, marketing, and sales support of our products and services. Peter has been an innovator his entire career and has a well-established voice in the industry. I am very excited to align his efforts with SSP’s brand of thought leadership.

I could certainly ramble on for a while longer about where we’re headed and how excited I am to have Peter joining his passion and leadership to my vision for SSP but I hope this brief post gets you thinking about the future of the technology and the industry. I work hard to never take this journey for granted and often say that the best thing I’ve ever done for SSP is to recruit the most talented industry leaders to work here together. And together we will continue to work with our customers and partners to innovate in the world of utility and telecom geospatial technology. It’s a darn exciting time and place to be! Please join me in welcoming Peter to the SSP and Esri family.