Editorial

The Big, the Bold and the Beautiful

New company alignments mean new equipment for surveyors

by Jon Fairall

I recently had an opportunity to fly to Hong Kong, as a guest of LH Systems, one of a swag of companies Leica Geosystems has acquired during the last few years. The LH Systems Editors-' Forum is more than just another conference. The company gets the editors of all the English language spatial industry magazines into one room, and lets them talk to each other for a few days.

Appropriately enough, the subject on everyone's mind was the consolidation of equipment manufacturing companies now underway in the industry. It was appropriate because Leica's aim is to make a serious commitment to every form of measuring technology.

Leica started out with some excellent terrestrial measuring equipment, including total stations and GPS receivers. This was itself the result of a series of acquisitions in Europe during the 1990s.

To this has now been added Cyra Systems, which manufacturs the Cyrax laser scanner. The scanner sweeps a laser over a scene and measures the distance to each point to within an accuracy of a few millimetres.

The company has acquired LH Systems itself, which builds a range of analogue and digital cameras and a series of flat-bed scanners that can be used to turn hard copy photographs into raster imagery.

LH Systems recently acquired a company from the US called Azimuth which has developed an airborne laser scanning system. This is being rebranded as the ALS 40.

Erdas Imaging, one of the largest companies in the image manipulation business, is another recent acquisition. Erdas is closely associated with ESRI, one of the largest GIS companies.

Technology mergers are difficult things to manage. At the end of the day, all an entrepreneur buys is the intellectual property of the employees. The physical plant involved is usually unimportant compared with ideas about product design or methodologies.

Because of this, the culture of a company - the way employer and employees relate to each other - becomes extraordinarily important. In the past, generations of entrepreneurs have failed to understand this. It's been war: the victor has attempted to impose new rules on the loser. Often, the victor realises too late that he has been handed a poisoned chalice. Employees have left, and the technology that only a short while before seemed such a glittering prize, has turned to dust.

Leica seems determined to avoid this sort of scenario. Instead of buying competitive products, it has built a jigsaw of complementary solutions. As a result, product development teams can be left in place, often with their original management teams still in place.

One of the biggest morale killers - a round of retrenchments - will be largely avoided. There will be little rationalisation during the months following an acquisition because there is little to rationalise.

Possibly the thorniest problem is that some parts of the Erdas product suite overlap with Leica's own Socet Set photogrammetric software. It is not clear what will happen yet, although apparently moves are already afoot to write software that will allow Socet Set files to be imported into Erdas software.

According to LH Systems executives, there is little overlap between the Cyra terrestrial laser scanning technology and the airborne laser scanning technology it acquired from Azimuth. The lasers used in the two products have very different characteristics: one operates over a few metres and measures to within a few millimetres, the other operates over thousands of metres and gives decimetre accuracy.

The two products also require very different processing software. Cyra's Cyclone software is devoted to helping its operator quickly make sense of the cloud of points generated by the scanner. For instance, it can recognise a pipe, or a flat wall in the cloud, and export that to CAD software as a separate entity rather than a set of points.

It also contains routines to allow two datasets, generated from different positions, to be knitted together to create a full 3D model of an object.

In the case of the airborne laser scanner, now called the ALS 40, the problem is to decode as much information as possible from each return from the ground. One problem is the need to detect the first return, which comes from the top of the vegetation, and the last return, which comes from the surface of the Earth.

Another requirement of such software is the ability to knit together many kilometres of flight data to make an accurate digital terrain model.

Wisely, Leica executives have chosen not to fiddle with two design teams that seem to be delivering the goods. Rather, their contribution to the process will be to make sure that all the development teams have the resources they need. That will not be a cheap exercise; it will require a company as big as Leica to afford the bill.

However, this will be of little consequence if it faces a market composed of such small companies that they can't afford to pay for such instrumentation. My guess is that such companies will come into existence over the next few years whether surveyors want it or not.

The crucial factor linking all these new technologies is the extraordinary change they will make to the productivity of surveyors. People who make this commitment will need deep pockets, but they will be able to generate money at a rate that will turn most current surveyors green with envy.

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