Right-Of-Way tracking with Performance Atlas

Client:  Electrical Contractors, Inc

ECI is a full service Engineering Design Firm specializing in the Power & Telecommunications Industry. They have offices in Montana, Arizona, Utah, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and more planned to open on the East Coast.

Goal: Provide efficient Right-Of-Way activity tracking capability leveraging the best of contemporary web technologies.

Services Provided: The Gartrell Group worked closely with company stakeholders to develop a detailed understanding of their Right-Of-Way workflows and desires for improvements and new capabilities. We then applied this information to adapt a Performance Atlas® deployment suited to their defined needs.

Pulling from the wide-variety of components available to our Performance Atlas®, we were able to provide ECI with a comprehensive solution that gives users access to different projects and the associated data, such as landowner contacts, tasks, financial information, public comments and the ability to toggle between a map-centric and journal view.

Key Technologies:  GIS Hosting, Performance Atlas (Software-as-a-Service)

Cloud-based GIS as a utility

We discuss the benefits of cloud-based GIS here quite a bit. One reason is obvious; it’s one of our products, and we’re in the business of selling products. But we also believe that cloud-based GIS is definitely a game changer.

The obvious

Cloud-based GIS changes the game in that it gets you out of tangling with your IT staff over server hardware, configurations, and permissions settings, or worse yet, trying to administer them yourselves when you’re a GISer and not a systems engineer! It also gives you a level of performance, redundancy, and failover that you’ve always known you should have and never managed to get in place.

The not-so-obvious

You’ve probably already realized the above game-changer issues, but here’s where we rock your world with an accounting paradigm shift. In the past, your server resources have been viewed as capital investments. As your needs have increased, you’ve no doubt had to engage in yearly battles to justify the expense of purchasing newer, bigger and faster servers. Over the past few years, many companies’ overall budgets have been tightened, which makes every department have to fight that much harder to get their piece of the pie.

Cloud-based GIS can save you from these battles, as it can function (and be accounted for) much more like a utility than may have been the case with your old server setup.  You may find benefit in moving our cloud-based GIS services into operations.

Contact us today to discuss your needs! Your accounting department will thank you (after they swallow the medicine…).

GIS Hosting for CB&I

Client:  CB&I
CB&I is a global energy infrastructure company with approximately 50,000 employees, working from more than 30 countries.  Growth in demand for GIS services from globally distributed customer groups presented the CB&I GIS and IT teams with a variety of challenges.  These challenges led them to seek assistance from the Gartrell Group to design, implement, and host specialized GIS infrastructure that would offer internal GIS staff, partners, and end users an improved level of service.

Goal: Establish high-performance production GIS infrastructure to support internal and external customers of this globally distributed, Fortune 500 company. 

Services Provided:The Gartrell Group collaborated with CB&I GIS and IT personnel to design, and then implement a high availability (HA), multi-tiered enterprise GIS platform.  The platform includes both data, and application tiers. It supports distributed/ remote editing teams, synchronization with corporate data systems, and integration of mobile data collection, all while conforming to CB&I’s IT security architecture and policy.

The hosted environment has been in production for over five years. The Gartrell Group has provided ongoing enterprise support services which include 24×7×365 system monitoring, regular systems analysis, engineering support, architectural planning and upgrade support.

Key Technologies:  GIS Hosting, ESRI ArcGIS Server, ArcSDE, Microsoft SQL Server, Mobile GIS

“You guys have been there for us.  This is one partnership that has really worked out.  We are definitely more effective since we made the transition to have you host our GIS systems.“  – Bill Harvey, Technical Manager, Geospatial & Information Management, CB&I.