2021 has been an exceptionally busy year at SSP Innovations. We kicked off the year by announcing our acquisition of 3-GIS which expanded our utility products and services into the telecom space with the market-leading 3-GIS Web platform. This summer brought on the industry’s first large-scale production deployments of the Esri utility network at multiple utilities with many more in the queue. And holistically, we’ve continued to significantly grow our products, services, people, and customer base throughout the entire year. Now, in early November, I’m excited to report back that our multi-year journey toward becoming the largest and most trusted Esri partner in the utilities and telecom space is well underway.
But don’t hear me taking that for granted. Not even for a second! The journey has been over many years and in complete partnership both with Esri and with our valued customers across the country and now, around the world. The investments we have made, and will continue to make, into our SSP products, the Esri utility network, and into the 3-GIS products have been significant and certainly garner a fair amount of our focus. For the most part, this work has focused on back-office, web, and mobile network-based GIS solutions, all tied to the latest and greatest Esri technology available.
First and foremost, you have my commitment that this investment will not change. As I look back on our collective work over the past five years, it has generally focused on upgrading and enhancing the typical workflows of a utility and telecom customer to the Esri ArcGIS Pro, the Esri utility network, Esri runtime (for mobile), and the latest Esri web maps and apps. And we’ve upgraded and introduced new SSP products across the board to ensure our customers have all of the tools they need for success. Beyond the technology, we’ve further worked to outline the true value of expanding your GIS data model to a more detailed level of granularity to allow you to more closely model a true digital twin of your real-world assets. And finally, we’ve led the way in reviewing each customer’s individual geospatial strategy which defines how they consume, expose, and empower their GIS data across their enterprise. All pretty darn exciting and interesting areas of work!
However, the focus of this post is on some of the other significant R&D investments we have been making this year around the future of where we believe GIS needs to be in the next decade. And why these investments should matter to you, our customers, as we continue to seek your trust and partnership each and every day.
We believe that our customer’s long term geospatial strategy must go beyond using the GIS as we have for the past couple decades and include embracing the many groundbreaking technologies that have hit the larger consumer-oriented world. And further, reimagining how we collect, interact with, consume, share, and distribute the geospatial data that has become so critical to our operations. To do this the right way takes commitment – both in investment but also in thought leadership. And 2021 has brought significant expansion in both areas. These topics all deserve their own blog posts, but I wanted to highlight a few areas here today.
Cloud and Web First
At SSP, we’ve been working in web GIS for about a decade but one of the most compelling value drivers behind our investment into 3-GIS was their exceptional web GIS products which are fully available via a hosted SaaS model or on premise. They never built products in ArcMap and took on the web-first mentality as a core mantra. This gets me excited and it’s one of the key challenges I’ve given to our CTO, Adam Tonkin, with regard to embracing this mentality across our future offerings. This aligns well with our focus on infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and general shift toward fully supporting utilities in the cloud and/or with a SaaS-based offering. While this hasn’t traditionally been embraced by utility customers, we’re seeing a tremendous amount of interest and it will absolutely be part of our future.
Innovation Hub
In 2021, we launched the SSP Innovation Shark Tank, led by Justin Rowsell. The entire purpose of this endeavor is to take advantage of the innovative ideas that occur across our ever-growing work force. This includes emerging technologies as well as focusing on potentially disruptive solutions to well known problems and processes. The Shark Tank formalizes how SSP employees can apply for and receive time & funding to allow them to pursue industry-shifting ideas with an end goal of creating either a proof of concept or an actual implementation that could be brought to our customers. And we will, of course, be sharing these results with our community of customers and partners via the Energy Advisor blog (now in its 11th year). We’ve just completed the first iteration and will be sharing a post soon!
Introducing SSP’s Chief Research Officer (CRO)
I don’t believe much in this world happens without a purpose/reason. So, early this year when I began talking with Peter Batty about joining SSP as our new CRO, it aligned perfectly with our 2021 focus on exploring groundbreaking and disruptive technology. Peter is partnering with our CTO, Adam Tonkin, to bring new technology research areas to fruition. They are both supporting Justin Rowsell on the Innovation Shark Tank as well driving SSP’s overall technological vision for the coming decade. In addition to this work, Peter has been championing our investment into automated field sourcing (AFS) which truly enables the capture and maintenance of a GIS digital twin by using computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to completely revolutionize the way our customers capture as-built updates. This is being built into a brand-new product, SSP Vision, which will serve both the utility and telecom customer industries. If you haven’t caught one of Peter’s presentations on SSP Vision or seen a demo, I’d encourage you to get in touch! In fact, we’re embarking on a select number of customer proof of concept (POC) engagements right now – if you’re interested, let us know.
Why Does This Matter to You?
When choosing your partner & platform for GIS products, services, and support, you want to choose not only the best partner for today, but also the best partner for tomorrow. And that is the driving sentiment behind our commitment and investment into these areas of future-focused R&D which are completely separate from our R&D efforts around advancing the product lines that we offer today.
SSP has been the up-and-coming sought-after firm for the past 10+ years and we realize that to maintain that coveted spot with our customers, we need to continually deliver today while keeping a keen eye on the future. And that’s my, and our, promise to you. I can’t wait to see what we do together in the next decade!
What do you think?