Dewberry was looking for the best way to solve clients’ problems. Skygone not only provided a solution, but “freed up Dewberry’s resources to develop a greater number of practical web-based solutions.”

“The individuals who started the company had a strong GIS background,” Poplin says. “They understood our applications and the needs of our clients, and they offered an impressive amount of security and redundancy.”

“We want geospatial professionals to be able to focus on GIS and their business and not have to focus on architecture, load balancing, and all the technical aspects of data hosting,” explains Ryan Hughes, co-founder of Skygone.

Both Hughes and Poplin believe the demand for cloud services will continue to grow as organizations see the benefits and overcome their security concerns. “Security is a two-way street between the cloud provider and the client,” Poplin says. “You have to take a close look at the cloud provider and the type of infrastructure and controls they have and make sure they comply with federal and industry regulations. As long as the solution has the correct architecture, the data will be secure. But the client also has complete control over how they implement security and policy regulations, so we have to help educate them on those aspects of data security.”

Read the full article.

Redlands, CA—With the New Year upon us, Skygone reflects on 2011, a year full of accomplishments, awards and a prelude to an even brighter 2012.   The growth and technological advances that Skygone experienced in 2011 has solidified Skygone as a thought-leader and fast-mover in the cloud computing and geospatial markets.

"Customers that we started talking to and educating years ago are coming back to us now and acting on their cloud initiatives in an aggressive manner," says Ryan Hughes, co-founder of Skygone.  "I think everyone wanted to make sure this cloud movement wasn't another dot com-like bubble. We've been successful putting even extremely complex enterprise applications in the cloud for about five years now, so most customers are past that fear.”  

That success is evident in some of this year’s highlights, including Hughes being named a “Cloud Accelerator” by CA Technologies. CA Technologies describes Cloud Accelerators as “cloud service providers who are showing enterprises and SMBs the best ways to realize value from cloud computing.”

In the fall, Lindsay McGreevy joined Skygone as the Director for Enterprise Solutions. “Lindsay’s depth of knowledge and experience of GIS and IT markets make her a valuable addition to our growing organization of GIS and cloud technology experts,” says Hughes. “Adding her to the team ensures that we will be prepared to meet the growing demand we see coming in 2012.”

To round out the year, Skygone was recognized with the CA Technologies “Partner Agility Award” at CA World 2011 last month. “This was a tremendous honor for us,” says Hughes. “And we’ll definitely be sharing more about this just after the New Year.”

“For 2012, we’ll be moving headlong into the Federal, State and Local Government markets and gaining FISMA authorization. It’s a big step, but we've set ourselves up to handle this explosive growth by leveraging strong, long-standing partners and investing in R&D to innovate cutting-edge technology that makes us more efficient as a service provider,” says Hughes. “We continue to see exponential demand trends in 2012 and beyond for Skygone's services."

About Skygone
Skygone enables organizations to implement leading-edge, enterprise-class solutions, quickly and efficiently by leveraging the Cloud.  Skygone's depth and experience with geospatial technology, cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), virtualization, green technologies and data center consolidation services has made Skygone a go-to service provider for commercial and government customers around the globe. www.skygoneinc.com. 

About theGISmarketplace.com
Skygone operates theGISmarketplace.com as a gathering place for you, the end-user of geospatial technology to discover solutions from leading and specialty software vendors in a neutral, no spin setting; to decide which technology is best for you with the help of comments from your peers, uploaded real-life implementation cases, and social networking plug-ins; and to deploy your chosen technology, in most cases instantly, on secure and high-performance environment powered by Cloud Computing.

Follow Skygone & theGISMarketplace

Twitter: http://twitter.com/skygone  | http://twitter.com/thegismp

Facebook: www.facebook.com/skygone | www.facebook.com/thegismarketplace

Redlands, CA—Skygone Inc is pleased to announce that Dewberry has earned the 2011 Partner of the Year Award for excellence in the adoption, use and proliferation of cloud computing and implementing these solutions for their customers. Last week at Dewberry headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, Skygone Co-Founder Ryan Hughes presented the award to Dewberry Associate Vice President Jeffrey R. Poplin, GIS. 

Jeffrey R. Poplin, associate vice president, Dewberry, accepts Partner Award from Ryan Hughes, co-founder Skygone Inc“Dewberry uses the cloud to provide their customers with lower costs, reduced vendor lock-in risk and an increased choice of deployment models,” says Hughes. “They have been a great partner and we look forward to more successful collaborations in delivering enterprise solutions in the cloud.”

 “We are proud to have been chosen as this year’s recipient of Skygone’s award,” says Dewberry’s Poplin. “And to have worked with our clients to help them achieve geospatial solutions in a cloud environment in a way that is efficient and highly scalable.”

For additional information, contact Skygone at info@skygoneinc.com or call 1-888-759-4471.

About Dewberry

Dewberry is a leading professional services firm with a proven history of providing architecture, engineering, and management and consulting services to a wide variety of public- and private-sector clients. Recognized for combining unsurpassed commitment to client service with deep subject matter expertise, Dewberry is dedicated to solving clients’ most complex challenges and transforming their communities. Established in 1956, Dewberry is headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia, with more than 40 locations and 1,800+ professionals nationwide. Follow Dewberry on Twitter http://twitter.com/TheDewberryWay, LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/company/dewberry and http://www.dewberry.com/News/Blogs.

About Skygone
Skygone enables organizations to implement leading-edge, enterprise-class solutions, quickly and efficiently by leveraging the Cloud.  Skygone's depth and experience with geospatial technology, cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), virtualization, green technologies and data center consolidation services has made Skygone a go-to service provider for commercial and government customers around the globe. www.skygoneinc.com.  Skygone is also the operators of theGISmarketplace.com, an application marketplace for geospatial technology, instantly deployed on the cloud. 

Follow Skygone & theGISMarketplace

Twitter:  http://twitter.com/skygone  | http://twitter.com/thegismp

Facebook: www.facebook.com/skygone | www.facebook.com/thegismarketplace

LinkedIn:  http://www.linkedin.com/company/skygone-inc

Redlands, CA—Skygone Inc will exhibit at the CA World 2011 conference to be held November 13-16, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Skygone has achieved Certified Cloud Operator (CCO) and Certified Cloud Architect (CCA) accreditation on the CA AppLogic® turnkey cloud computing platform, making them qualified to provide enterprise-class cloud computing solutions.

“This is a great opportunity for us to meet and share ideas with other CA Technologies customers and partners,” says Ryan Hughes, co-founder, Skygone Inc. Earlier this year, Hughes was recognized as a “Cloud Accelerator” by CA Technologies, joining an elite group of cloud thought leaders and experts.

Powered by the CA AppLogic platform, Skygone Cloud can offer customers instantly deployable web applications as part of a robust and scalable IT infrastructure that fully contains everything it needs to run. The technology also enables customers to easily scale and replicate entire applications, host mission-critical applications on a redundant, high-performance infrastructure, maintain legacy applications that reside on legacy platforms and provide instant development platforms for developing new applications.

“Skygone is positioned as the leading GIS cloud provider on our cloud platform. Skygone's vendor-neutral approach allows them to provide the best of breed GIS technologies from both commercial and open source providers,” says Ryan Shopp, senior director of product marketing, Virtualization and Automation, CA Technologies.

Through Skygone’s GIS application store, theGISmarketplace.com, customers can take advantage of the CA AppLogic platform to instantly deploy prepackaged geospatial solutions to solve many business problems. Whether businesses are looking to implement location-based services (LBS) for their customer base, manage assets and facilities, or conduct risk-avoidance “what-if” scenarios, theGISmarketplace.com makes available a wide variety of cloud-based geospatial solutions from the industry’s leading GIS applications.

“Our cloud platform is ideal for mobile development because we can support the entire product lifecycle from development, to testing, to deployment,” says Val Dotchkov, Skygone Inc. CTO. “We also have the knowledge and experience in location intelligent integration into enterprise business systems like SAP, Salesforce and help desk systems."

For additional information, contact Skygone at info@skygoneinc.com or call 1-888-759-4471.

About Skygone
Skygone enables organizations to implement leading-edge, enterprise-class solutions, quickly and efficiently by leveraging the Cloud.  Skygone's depth and experience with geospatial technology, cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), virtualization, green technologies and data center consolidation services has made Skygone a go-to service provider for commercial and government customers around the globe. www.skygoneinc.com.

About theGISmarketplace.com
theGISmarketplace is a gathering place for you, the end-user of geospatial technology to discover solutions from leading and specialty software vendors in a neutral, no spin setting; to decide which technology is best for you with the help of comments from your peers, uploaded real-life implementation cases, and social networking plug-ins; and to deploy your chosen technology, in most cases instantly, on secure and high-performance environment powered by Cloud Computing.theGISmarketplace.com is operated by the GIS and Cloud Computing professionals at Skygone.

Follow Skygone & theGISMarketplace

Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/skygone  | http://twitter.com/#!/thegismp

Facebook: www.facebook.com/skygone | www.facebook.com/thegismarketplace

“We are very excited to welcome Lindsay to the team,” says Ryan Hughes, co-founder, Skygone Inc. “Lindsay’s depth of knowledge and experience of GIS and IT markets make her a valuable addition to our growing organization of GIS and cloud technology experts. Coupled with her energy and leadership capabilities, Lindsay’s market vision will be a tremendous asset for our customers.”

McGreevy brings more than 15 years of geospatial and IT expertise.  In her career, McGreevy has led organizations in the role of planner, GIS analyst for the Bi-State Regional Commission covering multiple counties in Iowa and Illinois, as well GIS Engineer for a major engineering and surveyor firm, also located in Illinois.  While at Esri, McGreevy’s roles included Application Prototype Specialist, Senior Solutions Engineer and simultaneously Competitive Intelligence Manager.

“Joining the Skygone, Inc. team provides the opportunity to develop solutions that combine my knowledge and experience of GIS and IT with traditional GIS capabilities in an innovative way,” says McGreevy. “I look forward to working closely with our customers and providing each with optimum and complete enterprise cloud solutions that break through both technology and business barriers.” 

McGreevy received her Master of Science degree in Information Technology from the University of Redlands, California, and Bachelor of Arts degrees in Geography and Southeast Asia Studies from Augustana College, Illinois.  McGreevy holds a variety of honors. She is a frequent technology keynote speaker at numerous national and international conferences that include a range of topics such as Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Federal Government and Remote Sensing and GIS. McGreevy is also a member of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) and an active participant of SCIP’s Women’s Leadership Council.

Stop by the Skygone booth and meet Lindsay at the FOSS4G conference next week in Denver.  For additional information, contact Skygone at info@skygoneinc.com or call 1-888-759-4471.

About Skygone
Skygone Inc. enables organizations to implement leading-edge, enterprise-class solutions, quickly and efficiently by leveraging the Cloud.  Skygone's depth and experience with geospatial technology, cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), virtualization, green technologies and data center consolidation services has made Skygone a go-to service provider for commercial and government customers around the globe. Follow Skygone on Twitter @Skygone and join us on Facebook.

About theGISmarketplace.com
theGISmarketplace is a gathering place for you, the end-user of geospatial technology to discover solutions from leading and specialty software vendors in a neutral, no spin setting; to decide which technology is best for you with the help of comments from your peers, uploaded real-life implementation cases, and social networking plug-ins; and to deploy your chosen technology, in most cases instantly, on secure and high-performance environment powered by Cloud Computing. theGISmarketplace.com is operated by the GIS and Cloud Computing professionals at Skygone. Follow theGISmarketplace.com on Twitter @theGISmp and join us on Facebook.

Redlands, California— Skygone, a leader in deploying, hosting, and managing GIS in the Cloud, will be a sponsoring and exhibiting at the FOSS4G conference September 12-16, 2011 in Denver, Colorado.  FOSS4G is the annual global conference focused on Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial, organized by OSGeo.

Skygone’s presence at this year’s conference is an opportunity for users of GIS technology to take quickly and easily advantage of open source GIS solutions through the power of cloud computing.

“We’re GIS software vendor- neutral, meaning we host almost all the leading geospatial software in the industry in our cloud and make it available for instant deployment on our application store theGISMarketplace.com,” says Ryan Hughes, co-founder, Skygone. “Organizations want and need the flexibility—and cost savings—of using free and open source solutions.  Our goal is to help customers deploy these solutions faster, manage them easier, and scale their solutions at any time to meet their needs. 

When you’re at the conference, please visit Skygone at Exhibitor Booth #11 where they will be available to discuss how you can deploy open source GIS in the cloud. Also, be sure to read a recent interview with Val Dotchkov, Skygone Chief Technology Officer, on the Advantages of Desktop GIS in the Cloud.

Ryan also provides insight into how service providers need to rely on multiple platforms as a silver bullet platform that can provide for the diverse needs of various customers is missing in the market.

Download the audio version of this interview: Big Data in the Cloud

View the original post here

Written Transcript: 

Can you tell me a little about Skygone?

Skygone is a company that's been around for about four years now. We focus on geospatial operations in the cloud. When we talk about geospatial operations, we're talking about maps on the web and location data. Anything that has an x, y coordinate on the global, we handle and we can put on a map and we can serve out for better intelligence on locations.

So what features of the cloud really lends itself to GIS?

When we talk about GIS, we're talking about big data and big processing needs. The software has gotten better over the last few years in that it handles multi-threaded machines and also handles a lot of the big data processing needs in a better way using versioning and some of the tools around the data itself in the backup and redundancy of the data. However, when you're talking about map data, you're talking about imagery. Aerial imagery is captured from satellites or planes flying in the air that are taking photos or maybe you're aware of Google Maps and Bing Maps – some of the oblique imagery. Some of the aerial imagery are, as you can tell, actual photographs and when those are taken and served over the web and served to thousands of people, that's a lot of processing that needs to happen on the back end and of course storage of those as well. When we talk about the cloud, we're talking about the promise of unlimited processing, unlimited data storage and consuming as you need and the ability to buy more as you need it without incurring a large capital upfront investment. So those are the pieces of cloud that are really promising and really lends itself to GIS.

You mentioned redundancy and backup – I would think with big data that would be an issue. Are there any other issues that Skygone has faced with big data?

Well, when you about big data, I really kind of put it in two categories. There's big data that's generated outside of the cloud that needs to be moved into the cloud and that's kind of a workflow issue, as we put it. There's a lot of technology – a lot of dark fiber in the ground that you can lease space to move big data between data centers or between your office and a data center. Obviously, that can get pretty expensive. There's also the old fashioned way of never underestimating the bandwidth of a FedEx box. We receive a lot of FedEx's from our customers of large mass storage devices that we plug into a grid. Basically, it takes a shorter amount of time to FedEx it overnight to us than it takes to upload it over the web. So, there's also a different category of data and that's big data generated inside the cloud. That means either through processing or updates or data products being made from other data that's sitting on the cloud and that data's a little easier to deal with. That data is really just a storage issue and expandability issue, and that's not so hard. The third step of course is making sure that your data is backed up and redundant so that if one data center goes down, it's available in another data center. Big data does make it more difficult to do those types of things. But it's not so much difficult from a technology perspective; it's more difficult from a budget perspective. So, when we talk about storing large amounts of big data, and we talk about storing it twice or three times instead of once, it's going to be more expensive. As I mentioned before, there is technology out there that helps you do versioning and snapshotting so that you have to save less of your data, not full copy, just incremental changes on that data. There are workflow ways around a lot of this stuff and that's where we focus and help customer to use the cloud to improve their workflows more than just moving their servers to the cloud because if you're just talking about moving your servers to the cloud, you're talking more about virtualization than cloud. The true promise of cloud is to be able to optimize your workflows and optimize your expenses based on these great tools that we've been provided over the last few years with cloud computing.

So to switch gears a little bit, it seems to me that there's a lot of competing cloud platforms out there. As a service provider, do you find that one platform can meet all the demands of your customers or do you run on multiple platforms?

At Skygone, we run on multiple platforms at this point. We would love it in the future if we found a provider that did everything we needed, however, there are just so many diverse requirements right now and the market is very rich in providers providing cloud technology, but I don't think anyone has a silver bullet yet. You know, something that you might see that's really flexible on the storage side and give you great options on the storage side, isn't as flexible in doing multi-tier applications on the application side. And of course, it's visa-versa, for providers that are really good at doing application level stuff on the cloud, their data storage story or their internal bandwidth story might not be as nice. So, we really look at each customer and look at their need and say "Hey, we have these tools in our toolbox and it's cloud provider A, B, and C" and determine from a cloud software perspective, which one applies the best and which one is going to be the best choice for our budget and the technical perspective for them, and that's really how we're providing solutions using cloud computing rather than just providing a platform.

Do you think the number of platforms will increase for service providers in the future or do you see an evolution going on with the platforms themselves where they're starting to handle more applications and they're more diverse?

Yeah, we're probably at the peak of everyone jumping in a providing their own platform right now - that's my own opinion. We're seeing lots of providers out there with lots of platforms and this week, this company is ahead and the next week the other company is ahead. I see that dwindling down. There's just going to be so much money spent in this area that people are going to merge, people are going to give it up, and people are going to go a different direction. There are going to be winners and losers. I don't know how long it's going to take for there to be winners and losers. I mean, obviously there are providers out there that have a large jump on the competition that are just now starting to say "We should probably develop a cloud platform." How long is that going to take for everything to washout? I have no idea. I think that the business opportunity is endless so even for companies and providers that don't have the leading product, there's probably a market from them as well, because people like to do business with companies that have relationships so as long as they hold the relationships, they're probably going to be fine. But from my perspective, I would love a turn-key silver bullet, we just haven't found it yet, but we're definitely on board with the companies that we think are leading the market and that's where we're going to stay.

Redlands, CA – Skygone, the leader in cloud computing for GIS, has been invited to present to the Western States Contracting Alliance (WSCA) during a two-day GIS cloud computing workshop taking place June 14-15^th.

Skygone is joined by Amazon, IBM, Google, and Microsoft as presenters at the workshop, which is a final step of their respective responses to the WSCA’s Request for Information (RFI) on Cloud Computing for GIS released in March.

The two-day workshop that takes place in Helena, Montana will cover a variety of topics; including, critical factors for a successful cloud implementation, organizational implications for customers within the cloud, and the impact on existing customer infrastructure.  Skygone and the four invitees will deliver structured presentations on the current and future implications of operating, licensing, and optimizing the workflows of GIS within the cloud environment. 

“It’s an honor to be asked by WSCA to present our view of GIS on the Cloud,” says Ryan Hughes, co-founder, Skygone. “We have years of experience running complex geospatial technologies on the cloud and that real-world implementation experience has armed us with vast knowledge that we are happy to openly share with the States.”

Founded in 1993, WSCA includes 15 states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. The primary purpose of creating WSCA was to establish the means by which participating states could join together in cooperative multi-state contracting.

Redlands, CA:  Skygone Co-founder CEO, Ryan Hughes is featured in CA Technologies new online series “Cloud Luminaries and Cloud Accelerators,” in an executive profile. Hughes shares his unique perspective on cloud computing success, and provides invaluable lessons learned for companies looking to cloud computing to solve their business and IT challenges.

CA Technologies describes Cloud Accelerators as “cloud service providers who are showing enterprises and SMBs the best ways to realize value from cloud computing. These Accelerators talk about the services they are offering, their own experiences coming up to speed with cloud computing and the companies they work with to help them realize their cloud strategy.”

“The Cloud Accelerators series is a great opportunity to share best practices and advice on developing strategies to implement cloud computing services,” says Hughes. “Organizations with limited internal IT staff and resources can learn how the Cloud can become an extension of their existing infrastructure, creating new opportunities to expand their market reach and get more out of IT in order to be even more successful.”

Read: Ryan Hughes’ Cloud Accelerator profile on “Building a Cloud for Location-Aware Applications”.

Also visit Cloud Luminaries and Cloud Accelerators to learn more from other leaders in Cloud technology.

About CA Technologies Cloud Luminaries and Cloud Accelerators

The Cloud Luminaries and Cloud Accelerators online series features videos and one-on-one Q&A’s with cloud industry experts and companies that are leading the way in cloud computing, as well as whitepapers and other tools that will help map the way to a successful cloud computing strategy. Both Luminaries and Accelerators share their views on best practices for implementing cloud computing to drive innovation, increase agility, create new business models, and build margins.

About Skygone
Skygone enables organizations to implement leading-edge, enterprise-class solutions, quickly and efficiently by leveraging the Cloud.  Skygone's depth and experience with geospatial technology, cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), virtualization, green technologies and data center consolidation services has made Skygone a go-to service provider for commercial and government customers around the globe. www.skygoneinc.com