Ahead of next week’s DistribuTECH conference in San Diego, I wanted to share a quick update on the groundbreaking SSP Vision product, which I have been leading the development of for the past couple of years.

Before I dive in, I wanted to say that I’ve worked in the geospatial industry for 37 years. I’ve previously been CTO at GE Smallworld, Intergraph and IQGeo, and I’ve created multiple successful products along the way. I’ve said this before, but I honestly believe that SSP Vision has the potential to be the most significant thing I’ve worked on during my career. For those not already familiar with it, SSP Vision is a revolutionary new field data capture product that has the potential to reduce the as-built update backlog in a utility or telecommunications company from months to minutes. It leverages new technologies including computer vision, machine learning and augmented reality. Here is a short two-minute demo:

Release Date Announced

The biggest news is that we now have a production release date for SSP Vision – it will be available on March 31 this year as part of the SSP ActiveGIS 4.2 suite of products (you can buy any of the SSP products, including Vision, either independently or as part of the suite).

First Beta Testing Project Completed

The Vision product has undergone proof-of-concept testing with multiple customers and we recently completed our first beta testing project with a US electric utility. This project was focused on improving the management of a streetlight replacement program, which is a high-profile project at the utility. They are working on replacing old style sodium lamps with more energy efficient LED lights. They use contractors for the installation work, but currently have a manual paper-based process for recording the work done, which means that there is a significant lag in knowing the current status of the project. With SSP Vision, they simply scan the new light using a standard iPhone, and all the required data and the location are automatically recorded in a couple of seconds. The data is immediately pushed back to their GIS, so they have an up-to-date view of the replacement project progress in near real time.

Feedback from the field users was excellent – they found Vision very simple to use and it eliminated the time they currently have to spend filling out a paper form. And for the utility management, it gives them much better visibility on the progress of this important project.

While Vision is designed to handle far more complex data capture tasks than this one, we see lots of opportunity for this kind of project: meter installations or switch-outs are very similar in nature, for example. Vision can be configured and deployed extremely quickly for this type of project.

Cloud based Software as a Service (SaaS)

Until recently our work was primarily focused on developing and proving out the iOS client application. More recently, we’ve built out the full Vision product by adding server side capabilities, turning it into a complete Software as a Service (Saas) offering. The server functionality includes authentication and user management, including integration with Active Directory; data upload from the client application; ability to review job information and data captured in the Vision client; and forwarding of the data onto the customer where it can be loaded into their GIS.

This functionality is implemented using a cloud native approach in AWS (Amazon Web Services), which brings several benefits. It uses a serverless approach, which for those not familiar with the term, doesn’t mean that there are no servers, but rather that as an application developer, we don’t have to worry about managing servers. We just provide Amazon with code that we want to run, and Amazon works out where to run it. If we suddenly get thousands of simultaneous requests, the system automatically scales, using as many servers as are needed to handle the load, and can immediately scale back again. If a server goes down, other servers are automatically used instead. So this architecture gives excellent scalability and availability.

Another key advantage to the SaaS approach, and the simple configuration tools that are part of the Vision product, is that the product can be deployed extremely quickly. A simple Vision application can be configured and deployed in minutes. Of course, enterprise software deployment best practice will often add efforts for things like testing, training, integration, and change management. But the overall implementation of Vision is much lighter weight than typical enterprise geospatial applications.

Summary

I’d like to close where I started. I truly believe that in my almost four decades of experience, SSP Vision stands to be the most revolutionary product I’ve ever worked on. If you’d like to find out more, please get in touch. And if you’re at the DistribuTECH 2023 show in San Diego, please stop by and talk to me and my SSP colleagues at booth 3803.