On Tuesday February 17, at the Geo Week event in Denver, the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) announced that they are in the final stages of fine-tuning the new National Spatial Reference System (NSRS) for a full deployment in 2027.
The modernization of the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS), planned by NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey for 2027, represents one of the most significant geodetic transitions in the United States in more than four decades. Its success, however, will not be determined solely by the scientific rigor of the new terrestrial reference frames or the precision of GEOID2022. The true test will be whether the private sector, particularly the companies that build and maintain the software used by surveyors, engineers, GIS professionals, and mapping agencies, fully implement the new system. Without broad industry adoption, the modernized NSRS risks becoming a theoretical improvement rather than an operational reality.
In order to explain to geospatial professionals how such a rollout will take place, a large delegation of NGS professionals and a number of private companies held an information session during the Geo Week event to gauge how the products represented by the panelists are getting ready for the launch of such an important change in the national geodetic reference system.
The panel was introduced by Galen Scott, NGS Constituent Manager and Rachael Dempsey, NOAA’s National Ocean Service’s Deputy Assistant Administrator for Navigation, Observations and Positioning and Acting Deputy Assistant Administrator for Coastal Zone Management, who explained to the packed auditorium the importance that private industry in general and the four companies represented in the panel in particular, will play in a successful deployment of the new NSRS.
These companies were Trimble, Autodesk, Blue Marble Geographics and ESRI. Together they probably count a majority of the geospatial community amongst its customers and daily users.
The 2027 NSRS rollout will only succeed if the major geospatial software vendors fully implement the new reference frames, epochs, transformations, and geoid models. These companies are the “last mile” between NGS’s science and the everyday workflows of surveyors, engineers, GIS analysts, and mapping agencies. Without them, the new NSRS would exist on paper but not in practice.
Private industry serves as the operational interface between NGS’s geodetic infrastructure and the millions of end users who depend on accurate coordinates every day. Surveyors rely on GNSS processing suites and field controllers; engineers depend on CAD platforms; GIS analysts work within enterprise geodatabases; and geodesists use transformation engines to migrate legacy datasets. In each case, the coordinate systems, transformations, and geoid models embedded in commercial software define how the NSRS is experienced in practice. If these tools do not support NATRF2022, PATRF2022, MATRF2022, CATRF2022, and the associated time‑dependent frames, users cannot adopt the new system—even if they want to.
Each panelist gave the status of their software updates, beginning with Towfique Ahmed from Trimble who explained this his company is already deeply engaged with NGS and NRCan and has beta NSRS support built into its geodetic libraries (TGL).
During his short presentation Towfique clarified that TGL already includes NSRS modernization functionality in beta mode and Trimble Access, Trimble Business Center, and Trimble Connect already expose user interfaces for NSRS beta coordinate systems. Final NSRS support will be pushed automatically once NGS releases the final frames.
Mackensie Mills, Senior Product Manager at Blue Marble Geographics, gave a status report on the implementation of the new NSRS in their software products and announced the full functionality of the new NSRS will be in all their products by the time the NGS is ready for the official rollout. More specifically, Mackensie mentioned that Geo Mapper software development kit (SDK) will have all the necessary tools to allow developers to embed these calculations into their own software solutions.
Keith Warren, Autodesk’s Senior Transportation Solutions Executive then made a short presentation about the future capabilities of their flagship product Civil3D and assured the audience that his company was working closely with the NGS in making sure that by the time of the full rollout of the new NSRS, Autodesk products will be ready.
To close the session, Linda Foster, ESRI’s Director of Land Records and Cadaster Solutions made a presentation in which she emphasized the huge number of organizations and end users that depend on ESRI’s products for the daily activities. Linda explained that ESRI was being very cautious and had made the decision to not add the NGS beta versions to their production software to avoid confusion, but if large users want to beta test, they could work something out with them.
The session ended with an animated Q&A period in which the attendees expressed their concerns about the availability of the new transformation data and the interoperability between the four products represented in the panel.
In conclusion, the importance of private industry extends to interoperability. Infrastructure projects, transportation networks, utility systems, and environmental datasets all move through multi‑vendor workflows. A DOT may collect GNSS data in Trimble, design in Autodesk Civil 3D, manage assets in ESRI ArcGIS, and perform datum transformations in Blue Marble’s Geographic Calculator. If even one link in this chain lags in implementing the new NSRS, the entire workflow becomes inconsistent. This creates risks for positional accuracy, regulatory compliance, and long‑term data integrity.
It was clear that all the software companies attending the session and not necessarily present at the event, have their own product development life cycles and exactly when they release the new NSRS into their production products will vary, so users should ask the companies they use about their plans.
For these reasons, the readiness of key software vendors is a central factor in the national transition. Their adoption timelines will shape when agencies migrate, how training is delivered, and how legacy datasets are managed. The modernization of the NSRS is not simply a scientific upgrade, it is a coordinated ecosystem shift that depends on private‑sector alignment.
This session at Geo Week 2026 was very useful in assuring the geospatial community that private industry will be ready when the new NSRS is fully deployed.
