The relentless march of geospatial technology and what it means for Smallworld GIS

Smallworld geospatial software’s evolution

In our modern world, innovation in technology continues its relentless march and is actually accelerating, especially in light of the coronavirus pandemic and the huge move toward remote working.

GE Digital’s Smallworld geospatial software has always been driven by leading-edge technology. Right from the very origins of the Smallworld geospatial information system (GIS) solution in Cambridge, England, in the late ’90s, creating disruptive solutions for contemporary business challenges has been fundamental to our technical strategy.

The origin of Smallworld GIS network solutions for utilities and telecoms

At that time, one of the biggest challenges was to enable large numbers of users to make collaborative and concurrent changes in complex spatial, connected-network, asset models found in the utility and telecom domains. The solution to this challenge was the Smallworld Version Managed Datastore, the basis of which remains a cornerstone of the Smallworld solution today.

This innovative technology allows multiple users to make concurrent changes through singular versions. Then it allows for a coordinated convergence of the changes back into the master in any order demanded by the business process. A robust conflict management process ensures business process objectives are followed, with no data loss during the merging of concurrent changes into the master database.

The lifecycle of the changed assets needs to reflect the current state on the ground, rather than reflecting the status from the system.

This critical capability has enabled Smallworld to build a customer base in excess of 800 customers across many industries, but particularly in the gas and electrical distribution utilities and the telecommunications sector. Customers have thousands of concurrent users accessing a single database managing hundreds of thousands of changes each year — scalability that is unparalleled.

The first release of Smallworld relied upon dedicated workstations that had the horsepower to drive the advanced spatial data visualization and processing needed to meet the complex business requirements. However, with hardware and software evolution, Smallworld no longer requires dedicated workstations. The emergence of web technology and connected field devices significantly changed how Smallworld capabilities are made available to end users.

GE Digital has kept pace with those advances and expanded our portfolio with solutions that deliver this capability in a way tailored to meet each user’s needs. While a small number of expert users still benefit from access to the full breadth of Smallworld capability, the vast majority of users are satisfied with simpler interfaces delivered over the web on desktops, tablets or smartphones.

GE’s philosophy of designing GIS solutions

These different groups of users with different needs also highlight a fundamental aspect of GE Digital’s software design process, which is the use of personas. Personas are “about creating products with a specific, not generic, user in mind,” and this is particularly important when you consider the wide range of users that rely on the data managed within Smallworld to achieve their goals.

Smallworld focuses on providing solutions tailored to the utility and telecom domains and common workflows within those domains. Users have to execute specific workflows that need strong lifecycle and process orchestration, such as planning network extensions, looking after network construction, managing network operations and, of course, sales and marketing driving a return on the investment made in the physical infrastructure of the network. All of these different groups have different needs, workflows and ways to interact with the data to meet their business objectives. GE Digital’s use of personas ensures that the user experience of our products allows users to meet their goals.

Using DevOps to manage geospatial software deployments

Across the GE Digital organization, all software development follows Agile methodology, enabling us to build solutions faster. Continuous integration\continuous deployment (CI\CD) is fundamental to our approach to development and allows us to adopt software development and IT operations processes (DevOps) across our product development and customer service delivery teams. Building every night and running an extensive suite of automated tests gives us confidence in the changes we have made.

For customer deployments, this can significantly streamline the deployment process and reduce the time for updates to the product portfolio. DevOps is enabling our customers to respond to change quicker than ever before.

Using Java with GE Smallworld GIS products

At its inception, Smallworld was based on an innovative object-oriented programming language called Magik. It provided the flexibility for rapid application development, a key factor in the spread and success of Smallworld.

In parallel, Java has become one of the world’s most widely used languages. Back in 2015, GE Digital adopted the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as the foundation for the Smallworld technology stack. This change seamlessly opened up access to a vast Java ecosystem while, at the same time, preserving the investments that GE Digital, our partners, and critically our customers had made thus far.

Now, hybrid Java-Magik applications can be quickly assembled through modular use of widely available open-source components with Smallworld at low cost. Our development continues to exploit these advantages as we progress on our roadmap.

Moving GE’s Smallworld geospatial systems toward the cloud

The cloud — perhaps the most over-used and frequently misunderstood term in use today! In the context of Smallworld, the term is typically used in two ways.

Firstly, the existing Smallworld-based solutions can be deployed into a public cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure. Smallworld’s flexible architecture lends itself easily to a public cloud deployment. Many customers, both large and small, are already in production on public cloud infrastructure.

Secondly, GE Digital is rapidly adopting technologies developed for the cloud, such as Docker, Kubernetes and node.js, with an aim to provide solutions with the most appropriate technology and deployment architecture for any particular need. For example, these cloud technologies offer significant off-the-shelf benefits for deployments in terms of greater reliability, security and flexibility. The adoption of this technology allows GE Digital to deliver increasing amounts of capability over the web while benefiting from the rich functionality and scalability of the proven Smallworld solutions.

Where next for GE Digital’s GIS network solutions?

From the inception of Smallworld, the approach has always been to use technology to solve complex business problems for our customers and at a scale that meets the challenges of the largest utilities and telecom operators. GE Digital continually looks to evolve our solutions with new technology as that technology becomes accepted and proven within the wider IT landscape. We do not leap from one technology stack to another but take measured progressive steps forward. In addition, we always strive to ensure that any steps forward align with our customers’ goals and allow our customers to move forward with confidence.

We are continually exploring emerging technologies to see how they can benefit our customers. Some technologies we have been exploring in the past years include augmented reality, machine learning, use of chatbots as digital assistants, and BIM. In each of these cases, we are not looking to re-invent the wheel, but rather, see how we can adopt off-the-shelf capabilities and combine that with the workflows and data supported by Smallworld to deliver increased value to our customers. This philosophy is at the heart of our development and underpins our future technology evolutions.