Executive Interview Series: Jack Dangermond, Founder and President, Esri

I'm nervous, Todd, that you're calling me legendary. Well, what kind of a legend is it? They know, they know what this is about. So, let's get started.

Well, I guess so. I'll think of them as we're talking. The first is people in the geospatial world are making footprints all over the planet; they're changing the nature of what's going on. And I talked about something called the geographic approach, which is a kind of framework for bringing geographic knowledge or geographic intelligence into their workflows. That was a big idea. So some people talk about a digital twin in reference to GIS. GIS is building the kind of digital twin of the planet. And they talk in terms of caching all of this information together so that engineers and planners and designers or people that make decisions can have a more informed platform for doing work. One of the big things that's occurring in our field is this notion of living digital twins, where data is brought in from many different sources: IoT, transactions updating a GIS, the weather, traffic movement. All these geographic phenomena are being wired up and they're being able to be fused into a virtual digital twin. And applications in engineering and design and environmental management and transportation, all of it, are being configured in such a way that they can take these streams of living digital twin information off the web as web services and mash it up and then make better decisions. So I think that's what I wanted to get across, both from a technology perspective, but also I think I talked about that I want people in this field, whether they are surveyors or remote sensing people or planners or engineers or whoever they are, to realize that they're actually part of a digital ecosystem. Maybe some people like to call it a kind of nervous system of the planet. They're all participating. They're measuring things, they're analyzing relationships, they're designing things, they're taking action. And this sort of community of geospatial people, with all of these individual players, are becoming interconnected and fueled by shared information. You know, in the academy they're beginning to call this open science: the idea that one scientist does some research and another scientist builds on that research. Okay, they have to have time to publish and get their credits and so forth, but this is kind of a community open science affair. So think about the library of a university; they have all the PhDs of everybody. Imagine that the PhDs were digital maps. So as I'm doing my science, whether it's in archaeology or in biology or sociology, they are sharing layers of understanding that other scientists pick up on and advance science as a kind of holistic enterprise.

Okay, that is an interesting metaphor. If we apply that same concept to basically all actors, like geospatial actors, measurers, planners, designers, construction people, they can draw on the science and as part of this they're doing transactions on a collective set of information layers, sort of smart layers that other people can build up. So it's like modeling, in fact, the processes of change that are occurring in cities and in farms and in forestry and so on, all as one big enterprise. That's so GIS is becoming distributed, a kind of platform for open applications or open science in the same way. Do you understand what I'm talking about, Tom?

Well, there are many players in this field, in the engineering design build construction field, as you know better than me. People that are surveying, remote sensing. What we do is build fundamental GIS tools that bring all of those technologies and all of those data sets that are the outcome of these technologies together into a geographic information system. And those GIS, as we call them, are increasingly becoming infrastructure or enterprise systems within organizations like utilities or planning agencies or engineering departments on the government side. One of the remarkable things that may be interesting to your users is that engineering companies are beginning to embrace this GIS technology for maintaining their work and integrating their work, bringing in outside maps and services dynamically, fusing them to do their own project work. But as a result of this, they're transacting onto databases that many of the government users are doing, so they're building 3D living cities through BIM transactions or other engineering transactions of all types.

Well, the definition originally of digital twins was coming out of aircraft and automobile digital twins, so that they can run a digital twin in a wind chamber and test its viability, whether a plane can fly or so forth, but it was a static digital twin. And I think the big change is that people are constructing reality, both the natural world and the built environment, in dynamic real-time digital twins. And that means the digital twin is becoming virtual, not a static set of files. It's a virtualized, from many sources, digital twin that's dynamically brought together on view or at the beginning of some analytics or the beginning of some interpretation of the digital twins or application of the digital twins. So that's a big shift, actually, and it's co-evolving with our wiring up of the planet. Everything that moves and changes is observed sometimes through imagery, sometimes through other kinds of sensing. And my colleagues in other companies across the whole spectrum, people like Trimble or Leica or other measurement companies, are getting conscious of this: they want their customers' work to be interconnected and made available as services. That's really GIS services of various types. And where we have been distinguished in the field is the idea that we can have technology that fuses all those measurement environments and brings them together so that the participants of geographic information are being fueled by a GIS. And on the, let me say it a different way. Okay, our relationship, I think last time we were together we talked about Esri's relationship with Autodesk Corporation. I think that was one of the fueling parts of it that just gets better and better. And I'm quite shocked, actually, that so many large engineering companies are embracing geography and this living digital twin of geographic information as part of their workflows. And they're definitely doubling down on other aspects of geospatial work and design, construction, engineering, build work, but they're empowering it with geographic knowledge so that their work gets better. It's more enlightened by bringing together social factors and environmental factors and economic factors as foundational information to be able to do design and engineering and construction. That's a huge thing, actually, Todd.

And so on one hand, the technology is fueling more direct work by the very people that read your magazine. On the other hand, the work that they do is getting wired into these government systems so that BIM data sets are becoming a kind of transaction for building 3D integrated cities. So you know, in a grocery store, we may have talked about this: when you buy something, somebody does a wand on the package with the barcodes, and the data model of the store is up to date. So what is the transaction engine for a 3D living city? It's construction. So at the end of a design and build, the submission of one of these data models from BIM can be integrated right into the living twin of a city, and all of a sudden everybody in the city, the fire people, the planning people, immediately can see, 'Oh yeah, this building was built.' And it also pertains to digital submissions during the cycle of workflows where a city's reviewing a building. They can bring in a BIM, they can look at the view shed, they can look at the solar impacts, they can see and communicate to their constituents what it's going to look like. So this fusion of GIS and engineering workflows and the data sets that are resulting from them is becoming real. And going back to what I was talking about earlier, increasingly this is where web services from cloud systems, the sort of cloud-izing of the workflows in design and build and serving of those data sets, is providing a fusion of information increasingly in real time.

Well, I'll have a couple things to say about it. First, Autodesk has been a really great partner. We have many partners, as you know, across the industry. And they have continued to open up their data sets for integration into GIS, and we in turn integrate the services and map information into their workflows and into their specific products. But we've also been at the same time working with the whole world of open standards. So IFS, these sorts of being able to dynamically bring in, particularly this is relevant in Europe, any standards-based BIM models into our GIS desktops or into our servers has been really refreshing and interesting to see. So standards are a kind of big thing for Esri. We have an open platform with open APIs and open architecture that people can extend, bringing our technology into other systems, but also being able to read and accommodate the same thing that we did with Autodesk Corporation for the open world. That is a big deal for us, both philosophically and technically. And you asked a different question: how do I measure success? I would say at the technical level, that's been good. And their teams collaborate; it's hard to have partnerships that are not inside of your own organization, hard for Autodesk and us to work this out, but it has worked, actually. On the other ways, measures are in adoption. And what I'm seeing, I mean, it's one of the fastest growing areas for Esri is the adoption of these large AEC and small AEC companies of this geographic approach to expanding and considering all the factors in their practices. And we're talking about really very large companies embracing GIS, not simply for use in their own workflows, but they're embracing GIS, somewhat surprisingly, as a kind of professional practice. So AEC companies are unique because they know how to do project management. And I don't know if you and I talked about this earlier, but it is one of the most exciting things to me is that GIS people really know the technology, they know the science, but they often don't have this idea of managing a project, beginning planning, all of this. And AEC companies really have it in their DNA. So it's fueling more involvement; it's expanding the practices of AEC companies to get involved in what has traditionally been a separate activity. And where that really goes is intriguing to me, because it really means that we're linking fundamentally into geography. The whole notion that AEC as a set of work practices are involved in creating the future, and the fact that they're embracing it so richly says that we have a chance of creating a more sustainable future, considering all the factors: social factors, economic factors, engineering factors, and environmental factors. You know, bringing it all together using geography as the framework. That excites me a lot.

Well, increasingly AEC firms are hiring GIS people that come from outside of their world. Maybe that's one of the dynamics of what you're asking. And that sort of interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary workflow is the outcome. Now, this is a kind of co-evolving. The technology evolves, like connecting engineering workflows to science workflows and GIS workflows, and then all of a sudden the methods that they use change. And as the methods change, technology evolves to support those new methods. So there's kind of a co-evolution between tech and applications or workflows. You know, a really neat thing to me. I mean, there's a great scientist that once said, 'For every new advance in idea, there's an advance in method.' And methods in science are co-evolving. Exactly the same thing is happening here from these heretofore sort of separate disciplines. And so these two worlds are coming together, and the outcome, I think, is a more sustainable set of workflows, you know, in the way things are done.

Yeah, actually it was developed in Stuttgart, in the home of digital photogrammetry for many years. And a group of students there left the university and started this company a number of years ago, and they invented some of the best technology to be able to take imagery of all types, aerial imagery, drone imagery, now satellite imagery, and process it in such a way that they can create very accurate digital products that can support the world. Basically, from accurate photogrammetrically derived base maps, orthophotos, true ortho, digital terrain models extracted from the imagery all automatically, and also these 3D point clouds, I like to call them 3D pictures, and do it at scale. So like doing all of Holland or doing massive parts of England. And this technology was interesting to us as a standalone engine. So when we acquired them, the job was to look at how do we bring that kind of technique and set of technologies right into what traditional GIS users have been doing. So think about automating the link between imaging and creating GIS products directly. So this reality capture technology heretofore called Sure, and there were hundreds of years of users of it in the mapping world, has now been refactored, re-engineered right into ArcGIS Pro or just enterprise support, so that people can begin to do this reality capture and use the outputs directly. So those of you who understand what I'm talking about will really understand that that is an automation linkage between imaging, whether it's from a drone or from aircraft or ultimately satellites, right into information products that update and change the digital twin of reality. Wow, that's really cool. So yeah, I mean, I'm pretty excited about that, as you can imagine. And our colleagues in other companies are also using this engine as extensions for their digital cameras because it's so efficient and very fast. I mean, the technology is not unique; there are other reality capture technologies in the marketplace, but what I think distinguishes this is it's really good, actually. I would say I'm not the right one to describe all the detailed attributes, except that it completely automates the process and results in products that are directly usable, and it's scalable. I mean, taking a whole country and creating these things, that's unheard of. Doing it in a cloud with a Kubernetes-based processing engine that's really scalable. So my thought is imagery coming from satellites, say, that get automatically processed into these directly usable products at scale for whole nations or whole regions, this is very cool. And I think it's going to transform the mapping business; it'll transform the way people act.