INDUSTRY INTERVIEW: Intergraph
R. Halsey Wise
President and Chief Executive Officer
Intergraph
R. Halsey Wise joined Intergraph in July 2003 as president and chief executive officer, and was elected to the board at that time. Prior to joining Intergraph, he served as CEO, North America of Solution 6 Holdings Ltd., the largest software company in Australia. Prior to that, Wise was president and chief operating officer of Computer Management Sciences Inc., an information technology services company that was later acquired by Computer Associates International. At Computer Associates, he was general manager, North America, for global professional services. Prior to that, Wise was an investment banker specializing in software and technology services with Robinson-Humphrey Co. He holds a master’s degree in finance and marketing from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Virginia.
Q: Can you give us an overview of your company?
A: For more than 30 years, Intergraph has met the challenges of military and intelligence agencies with proven solutions, including products, processes and experienced professionals. Creating customerdriven geospatial intelligence exploitation and production solutions, Intergraph helps military and intelligence professionals meet their operational goals and enable data sharing across the enterprise and around the world. Intergraph’s fully robust and intuitive geospatial solutions enable military and intelligence organizations to dynamically combine data from different sources into a single, seamless environment—facilitating a common relevant operating picture—for better decision making and user-ready capabilities.
Protecting lives, land and liberty, intelligence agencies worldwide rely on Intergraph to meet their operational goals.
Q: What are your products?
A: Intergraph provides critical technologies to many national governments, including military and intelligence organizations. For example, our Geospatial Intelligence Production System [GIPS] provides national mapping agencies with unparalleled tools for efficient and accurate end-to-end map production, and our Image Scout product provides a unique combination of advanced image analysis and geospatial data fusion that provide today’s decision makers with powerful and easy-to-use analysis and visualization tools. Additionally, Intergraph provides world-class incident management and emergency response technology that plays a crucial role in protecting citizens around the world, including those in cities such as Washington, D.C.
Q: What makes your products stand out, and why are they different or the best in the market?
A: Intergraph’s products are outstanding because they allow our customers to make better sense of large volumes of complex, dynamic and sometimes disorganized data. This enables formulation of higher quality decisions more quickly than ever before. Intergraph’s products provide superior analytical capabilities and give strong attention to interoperability and open data management, delivering increased flexibility and speed of implementation for these systems.
Q: What is your position in the market sector?
A: Intergraph is a leading technology provider in those global market sectors that are critical for national security and critical infrastructure protection, such as military and intelligence, incident management and emergency response, utilities and communication, transportation, and plant design and engineering.
Within these market sectors, Intergraph’s solutions allow our customers to leverage many of their existing IT assets, unleashing the power locked within their data, thereby allowing them to provide better quality service to their customers more efficiently than ever before.
Q: Are you a fairly new player in military/geospatial intelligence or established?
A: Intergraph is a very established player within the military and geospatial intelligence communities. For example, we have been a longtime partner of what is today the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency [NGA] for over 25 years and have been supporting it throughout the numerous transformations that it has undergone. Our longest heritage with NGA has primarily been on the map production and data management technologies, but we recently have been experiencing large growth in the use of our Image Scout product for broad area search workflows.
Q: What are some examples of success in the military/geospatial intelligence field, and goals for this year?
A: Last year Intergraph established an enterprise site agreement with NGA that formalizes a technology partnership for transformation to support national security objectives. Through this agreement, Intergraph will provide greater assistance to the agency in its efforts to provide timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security objectives. Another recent success is the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority selection of Intergraph’s commercial off-the-shelf command-and-control solution that will serve to upgrade its electronic security operations infrastructure.
Q: How are you positioned for the future within the military/geospatial intelligence business?
A: As the U.S. intelligence community evolves to play an increasing greater role in domestic security operations through collaborations with other federal and state/local organizations, their partnerships with Intergraph will prove to be increasingly more valuable. Our strong experience and superior technology offering in those critical infrastructure protection and national security market sectors will allow for streamlined collaboration and more efficient joint operations between the intelligence community and those organizations. ♦
