Greetings and welcome to the new issue of Perspectives. Having previously been on the receiving end of this newsletter, I am honored to write to you now as President and Managing Director of Fugro EarthData. Through Perspectives, our goal is to communicate the successes we are achieving for, and in partnership with, our customers; to offer viewpoints about technology issues from leaders outside our organization; and to provide insight into Fugro EarthData's overall business operations.
This last point is especially important given the ongoing global financial crisis. Alongside coverage of the recent and historic U.S. elections, financial troubles continue to dominate the news. Yet despite the current economy, I am optimistic about the role of geospatial services in helping to move government and business forward. These data are critical to natural resource development, infrastructure, economic development projects, and, of course, geointelligence applications.
My focus since joining Fugro EarthData has been to position the company for success in this regard. Over the past several months we have made significant progress in organizing the company to weather the current economic challenges so that we may continue to meet customer needs for high accuracy, high quality data, and on-time delivery. Through recent customer visits, I feel that we are on the right track.
In these meetings, I have received detailed and enthusiastic feedback related to our GeoSAR and digital mapping services and to our project management team. Committed to excellence, we will build on these successes, focusing on you, our customer, and investing in innovative solutions to meet your quality, budget, and schedule requirements.
This issue of Perspectives provides several working examples of our commitment, including the feature article on a land-use/land-cover mapping project
we are completing for Horry County, South Carolina. The county believes this first-generation data layer to be essential for effective stormwater management given their coastal location and status as one of the nation's fastest growing counties. The project builds on our award-winning image classification methodology first developed for the Texas Benthic Mapping Project last year.
You'll also find a Q&A with Learon Dalby, GIS manager for the State of Arkansas and current National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC) president. In talking about the relationship between technology and GIS user needs within state government, Mr. Dalby emphasizes the importance of partnership, public access to geospatial data, and the increasing role of GIS in every part of state government for data-driven decision making.
This idea of partnership is furthered in an article outlining our participation in a National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) research and internship program
with students from North Carolina Central University. By hosting six interns in our GeoSAR Services Division over the course of 2 years, Fugro EarthData is not only helping advance GeoSAR-related research at the university level, but we are also helping to train qualified students for the future.
I hope you find the newsletter informative and interesting. And as my time with Fugro EarthData grows, I look forward to meeting more of you during my travels.
Best regards,
Edward Saade
President and Managing Director
www.fugroearthdata.com
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