{"id":68239,"date":"2017-05-16T20:08:58","date_gmt":"2017-05-16T12:08:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/finding-value-in-big-data-digitalglobes-gbdx\/"},"modified":"2017-05-16T20:08:58","modified_gmt":"2017-05-16T12:08:58","slug":"finding-value-in-big-data-digitalglobes-gbdx","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/finding-value-in-big-data-digitalglobes-gbdx\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding Value in Big Data: DigitalGlobe\u2019s GBDX"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

In order to maintain its reputation as a go-to source for detailed satellite imagery, DigitalGlobe<\/strong> is adapting its business structure to make it easier for other companies to leverage its data. According to Kevin Lausten, director of geospatial big data at DigitalGlobe, such efforts have allowed the company to pursue opportunities in new market sectors, diversify its revenue streams, and also push for the democratization of Big Data.<\/p>\n

During the 33rd National Space Symposium, DigitalGlobe CEO Jeffrey Tarr noted that the company is transforming itself from a satellite operator to a wider \u201cinformation business\u201d \u2014 or in other words, finding new applications for its massive cache of data. GBDX, the company\u2019s geospatial big data analytics platform, is core to that transition, according to Lausten.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t have a good way for companies like Orbital Insight<\/strong> to quickly gain access to thousands, if not tens of thousands, of our images, and then start running some of these newer age computer vision and deep learning algorithms against the data,\u201d Lausten said. \u201cThat was really the driving force around the creation of GBDX.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"Kevin
Kevin Lausten, DigitalGlobe\u2019s director of geospatial big data. Photo: DigitalGlobe.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

GBDX has enabled DigitalGlobe to forge new, profitable partnerships with companies looking to create solutions across a range of sectors. For example, Orbital Insight pairs its analytics with the GBDX archive to predict sales performance trends by tracking cars in retail parking lots around North America. \u201cIs Target going to be delivering above expectations for their financial performance on a quarter-over-quarter basis? If Orbital Insight can predict those trends before earnings announcements are made, that\u2019s interesting to the financial industry,\u201d Lausten said.<\/p>\n

The key, he said, is that this is a solution that companies in the financial industry would not have considered on their own. \u201cThe financial services industry would not traditionally be in a position where they would either build that type of application themselves or come to DigitalGlobe and buy large volumes of satellite imagery because that\u2019s not their core competency. They don\u2019t know how to interpret the imagery,\u201d he said. Orbital Insight, and DigitalGlobe by extension, are thus able to unlock hidden value by solving a problem financial companies may not even have known existed.<\/p>\n

But due to limitations of cost and access, it wasn\u2019t always so easy for companies to build applications based on DigitalGlobe\u2019s data \u2014 which ran counter to Tarr\u2019s vision of data democratization. So according to Lausten, DigitalGlobe has tweaked both its technical operations and its business model to accommodate a wider breadth of potential customers.<\/p>\n

Previously, if a company needed an image from DigitalGlobe, the two entities would sign a contractual agreement, after which DigitalGlobe would post the dataset to a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) site where it could be downloaded to a local workstation. \u201cBut what we\u2019re seeing is there\u2019s a much wider pool of users that don\u2019t want to download a dataset from an FTP site,\u201d Lausten said. \u201cThey don\u2019t actually need to look at the image. They just want to run processing against it to find the interesting bits of information.\u201d<\/p>\n

DigitalGlobe has turned to the cloud to simplify this process, and is currently uploading every image it has ever collected to Amazon Web Services. \u201cTwelve months from now we are going to have the entire DigitalGlobe archive on Amazon Web Services so that anybody can come in, grab the images they want and compute against them. That starts to unlock new use cases and enables a lot of companies to grow by making this data much more accessible,\u201d Lausten said.<\/p>\n

On the business side, DigitalGlobe has also worked to make accessing its data more affordable for all of its customers. In addition to its traditional perpetual ownership model, DigitalGlobe has now incorporated a rental approach as well. \u201cBy renting access we can offer a much more compelling price point and business model around access to the system itself,\u201d Lausten said. Five years ago, if Orbital Insight had tried to replicate its current applications through GBDX, Lausten said the cost would have been \u201can order of magnitude more than the company was worth at the time.\u201d Now, since the price is commensurate with how much data customers use and how long they access it for, the platform is more cost competitive for companies such as Orbital Insight that want to test new ideas and launch new products.<\/p>\n

Alongside these changes to its business strategy, DigitalGlobe is experimenting with new ways to turn its data into value, including working with Facebook\u2019s<\/strong> facial recognition technology to track remote population centers and partnering with Australia\u2019s Public Service Mapping Agency (PSMA) to map the country\u2019s residential areas for the insurance market. Eventually, Lausten said the company hopes to expand its number of users from dozens to thousands, and continue stretching its reach into new verticals along the way.<\/p>\n

\u201cI tend to hear about new industry applications almost on a daily basis, which is very exciting and gives me a lot of confidence in developing the business,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is a lot of work that we can do with our content, our platform, and our analytical capabilities to help make sure that those activities are as efficient and as effective as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In order to maintain its reputation as a go-to source for detailed satellite imagery, DigitalGlobe is adapting its business structure to make it easier for other companies to leverage its data. According to Kevin Lausten, director of geospatial big data at DigitalGlobe, such efforts have allowed the company to pursue opportunities in new market sectors, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":68240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68239"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}