Business Intelligence And 4IR Go

A lot of innovation is coming from start-ups who are not primarily building geospatial products, but are actually the users of geospatial in what they are trying to do, Sandeep Singhal,  Director, Cloud Storage, Google, USA, highlights in an exclusive interview

GIS has long been playing a vital role in Business Intelligence. What are your views on this?

The importance of GIS can be stressed enough to provide valuable insights into the business, identify potential areas that are worthy of an analysis and then help present those results effectively back to customers. It is both a pre-analysis layer to understand what is happening and then a presentation layer to presenting it back to users. A lot of heavy lifting work is happening in the areas of analytics and machine learning using data that is pulled from the GIS systems and then delivered right back to the GIS systems.

Geospatial technologies are making Business Intelligence more intelligent, enabling businesses to take better decisions. What do you think the trends in this regard are?

The trend here is really towards deep learning and deep understanding of information, getting a large variety of information from different sources, ranging from small sensors to traditional mapping applications, and delivering that knowledge to enable you to make decision and make changes. Business Intelligence and the Fourth Industrial Revolution go hand-in-hand. There are tons of examples where companies are using images and image process to extract information from satellite imageries and drone imageries to understand various aspects like crop behavior — where does fertilization need to happen; what is really happening in the fields. It is important to bring in machine learning to understand what is happening to these images, add real-time imagery from drones and other local sources and then drive decisions that a farmer can take to optimize his crop yield. So, this is a form of Business Intelligence that takes advantage of all of these different components.