A massive space/geospatial vendor
DigitalGlobe is an American commercial vendor of space imagery and geospatial content. It operates civilian remote sensing spacecraft. This includes the most sophisticated commercial satellite constellation in orbit. Their Geospatial Big Data Platform (GBDX) is the world’s first cloud-first remote sensing platform. DigitalGlobe is publicly traded. In 2015, it had revenues of $702.4 million USD.
Promising, but not easy
Undertaking remote sensing analysis on the cloud is alluring. It’s also deeply complex. The opportunity involves leveraging a catalogue of high-res imagery. Data gets processed at cloud-scale, without needing to download any images.
The challenge lies in building a flexible system. It must provide the community with web-based toolkits for broad analytical capability. Also, the system needs to be performant. DigitalGlobe’s engineering team faces an enormous task ahead.
On-tap geospatial expertise
Sparkgeo adds geospatial capacity for DigitalGlobe. We act as a reliable, elastic, and adaptable geospatial team. We take on projects that need immediate attention. This happens when they have limited internal bandwidth.
We embed our teams into their Geospatial Big Data group. Motivated and experienced geospatial experts make up these teams. They provide added geospatial software capacity and an external perspective on products. The assist with cloud devops, data warehousing, algorithm curation, and Jupyter notebooks.
We’re in this together
We value our work with DigitalGlobe—which goes back to 2015. This is a meaningful, long-term relationship. (We like helping our friends succeed.) We write code for DigitalGlobe, but that’s not all. We offer product insight and market intelligence. We also offer market vertical exclusivity—which further aligns our goals.
“SparkGeo has been an integral member of the DigitalGlobe GBDX team since the product’s inception. Though remote, they have worked as embedded members of our engineering team, and over time have become deep experts in our systems as well as reliable colleagues. Their expertise in scalability, devops, microservices, as well as all things cloud and geospatial have enabled us to iterate on solutions and production-ize our platform faster than we would have otherwise been able. It is a pleasure to continue working with SparkGeo.”
— Nate Ricklin, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at DigitalGlobe
“Sparkgeo is a critical partner DigitalGlobe relies on for development, testing, documentation, operations and support of our cloud-based geospatial big data analytics (GBDX) platform. The Sparkgeo team has a wide variety of skillsets and technology expertise that we leverage on numerous projects ranging from GBDX Notebooks to our premium analytics suite of algorithms. Their extensive experience with scalable cloud computing infrastructure and artificial intelligence machine learning allows DigitalGlobe to rapidly advance the capabilities of our GBDX platform to meet the needs of our customers. The Sparkgeo team is always on top of the latest geospatial industry trends and cutting-edge innovations that allow GBDX to transform geospatial data into timely meaningful insights that improve decision-making and ensure mission success.”
— Adam O’Connor, GBDX Product Manager at DigitalGlobe