VertiGIS Neo delivers modern web and mobile user experiences through four different solutions: VertiGIS Studio, VertiGIS FM, VertiGIS Networks, and VertiGIS ConnectMaster. VertiGIS Neo is an umbrella for those modern, global solutions, says Drew Millen, CTO.
“VertiGIS increasingly sees organizations adopting several solutions from VertiGIS across our broad portfolio; Neo provides a vehicle to harmonize the common tenets across these modern solutions, such as the cloud-centric architecture, elegant web and mobile interfaces, and innovations with AI.”
He explains that Neo is not a product, and that it doesn’t have versions or editions: “Neo brings VertiGIS’ existing solutions together under one common vision for the future, somewhat similar to Office 365: when Microsoft unveiled O365 they not only unified their products under one roof, they also emphasized and brought forward common patterns and a common experience so customers can more easily use the office suite of products together.”
Featuring embedded AI to enhance innovation and productivity for end users and application development teams, VertiGIS Neo transforms workflow processes in three key areas: end-user assistants, application builder productivity, and process transformation.
Those three areas are quite deliberate, explains Millen. First, there are aspects of AI that will help end-users complete tasks and workflows inside web and mobile applications. Examples include natural language voice prompts that automatically generate spatial queries or contextual help derived from user input. Second, there are AI components that can help administrators configure applications more efficiently with less time and training. For example, automatically generating an asset inspection checklist based on the type of asset and the local regulations required for inspecting that asset type.
Finally, Millen sees opportunities to transform the way organizations currently conduct their business processes: “especially in the area of field mobility, AI can help with image recognition to perform automatic inspection records including object classification and damage assessments, or optical character recognition to replace manual entry of paper-based forms with digital records.”
Most of the power VertiGIS has been able to unlock comes without having to supply or train a proprietary LLM, says Millen: “Our flexible, configurable solutions inside Neo enable embedding AI logic from a variety of readily available models. Most of our research and development has been with Azure OpenAI, but we’re not restricting the playing field: if customers want to rewire applications to use their own pretrained models based on datasets that match their business needs, we can accommodate that.”
VertiGIS Neo focuses on providing solutions for specific verticals instead of providing generic tools. VertiGIS thoroughly researched the demand for such tools through data and inputs from decades of work with customers in focus industries, and in-house domain knowledge has been complemented with third party research, surveys, and inputs from its extensive partner ecosystem.
The demand for solutions that go beyond the generic technical toolsets that are supplied with GIS infrastructure is recorded and evident, says Millen. Using the utility sector as an example, he states that utilities use GIS across dozens of use cases to manage the lifecycle of their network assets from planning, to design, to construction, to operations, and ultimately decommissioning.
Millen concludes: “Across these use cases, GIS needs to integrate with third party systems and satisfy a wide variety of stakeholders and user types. Generic tools and features fall short, since that approach requires forcing general-purpose technology into the intimate requirements of each of these use cases, wasting time and resources. Supplying point solutions for each use case causes fragmentation, creating overhead and resulting in fragile system integrations. The VertiGIS Neo solutions approach addresses the business needs of the enterprise comprehensively and focuses on optimizing the processes across all use cases with a common foundation.”
