Intergraph®’s Server and ECW Technologies Handle Big Data Management and Delivery

December 04, 2013 -- Germany’s Wichmann VDE publishing house selected Intergraph^® SG&I as the 2013 Innovation Award winner for Best Product. Competing with seven other vendors, Intergraph SG&I was nominated by an independent jury of five geospatial scientists and selected by a large margin of geospatial industry voters.

Intergraph submitted a Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution, which is based on Intergraph’s high-performance, Enhanced Compression Wavelet (ECW) image-compression format, designed specifically for geospatial imagery. The solution is supplemented with lightning-fast streaming via the Enhanced Compression Wavelet Protocol (ECWP).

An impressive example of these capabilities is the creation of the largest and fastest geofile of Germany, enabled by ECW/ECWP and Intergraph’s cloud infrastructure. The challenge for RWE AG, one of Europe’s leading utilities companies, was to handle a huge volume of data covering the whole of Germany – an area exceeding 365,000 square kilometres. The crux of the issue: how to deliver 38 terabytes of imagery data at 20 centimetres ground resolution, spread over 370,000 files. In order to overcome the sheer volume of data, ERDAS IMAGINE was used to process and compress the 38 TB of source imagery down to a single ECW file less than 1 TB in size, while retaining the imagery’s full visual quality and excellent performance.

Today’s geospatial consumers expect instant data delivery. The highly effective, visually-lossless ECW data compression (offering compression rates of up to 95 percent) , and the rapid delivery of geospatial data via ECWP convinced the majority of voters. Intergraph’s reliable 24/7 DaaS solution manages millions of geodata files, produces one ECW output file and provides multiple web services like WMS and WMTS, including easy data distribution via ‘Clip-Zip-Ship’ workflows. It supports desktop, web and mobile devices, and reduces network bandwidth, IT resources and costs.

“The innovative, trendsetting solution and the combination of ECW compression and ECWP streaming puts the conventional, slow and memory-intensive process of mosaic imagery and image tiles far into the shade”, says Robert Widz, EMEA Geospatial Executive Director at Intergraph SG&I. “All in all the latest ECW technology is a milestone solution to the Big Data issue”. Intergraph congratulates fellow Hexagon company, Leica Geosystems for being the winner of the second prize for its innovative Leica Nova MS50 MultiStation, which combines every significant measuring technology in one device.

For more information about Intergraph’s geospatial products, visit http://geospatial.intergraph.com/Homepage.aspx