The fifth GIS survey from the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA) has just been released. The report surveys 197 companies using geospatial technology in utilities, pipelines and telecommunications (upstream was not included in the study). 18 companies, managing a total of over 142,000 miles of pipeline, responded to this survey. A significant increase in total project costs was observed with half of all pipeline GIS projects now costing over $750,000. Vendor market share varies widely across different sectors. For pipeline GIS, Intergraph (26%) just leads ESRI (21%) with the rest shared between several vendors.
COTS
Pipeline companies have been slow to embark on GIS projects—but lower hardware, software, and COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) data costs are enabling implementations on a departmental budget level. The business case has been successfully made for pipeline GIS.
Compliance
Top three pipeline GIS applications are data integration, risk management and integrity management – particularly with regard to regulatory compliance. Two-thirds of the companies surveyed said they were finished with landbase conversion—a remarkable achievement. Again, COTS data availability has significantly lowered the cost of GIS deployment.
GITA
The Geospatial Technology Report 2002 is available from the Geospatial Information & Technology Association, 14456 East Evans Avenue Aurora, Colorado 80014-1409 U.S.A. info@gita.org and www.gita.org.
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