Moving to the Cloud by Ciaran Kirk, Operations Director, IMGS

In today’s changing world, work practices have changed forever, and on-premise systems are proving expensive to maintain while not providing the level of access and performance needed.

Moving to the cloud is not a new concept, and where previously it was a nice tech option, it is very quickly becoming the only solution available to organisations, who want to:
1. Decrease infrastructure capital and operating expenditure
2. Provide true resilience for continuity and disaster recovery purposes
3. Provide elastic scale to handle peaks in demand
4. Query large datasets which have outgrown on premise data storage
5. Take advantage of the latest AI and Machine Language analytics to gain rapid insight

If we take each one of these points in turn, we can see why moving to the cloud is a key part of any digital transformation:

 

Decrease infrastructure capital and operating expenditure
By moving your systems to the cloud, you are removing the need to have on premise servers thereby decreasing your systems administration overhead. This can be a significant cost saving, if done correctly and at the right time.

One option is to look at IAAS – Infrastructure as a Service – where you migrate your servers to cloud providers such as Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure. In this case the cloud provider is providing the infrastructure and will ensure your servers are physically up and running.

       

 

 

 

In the case of IAAS, your IT support team must still maintain the system running on the server, so it doesn’t completely remove the need for IT systems support.

If the aim is to remove or greatly decrease systems administration overhead as well as the infrastructure costs, then SAAS (Software as a Service) is the perfect model. With the SAAS model the supplier handles the infrastructure and the software system and support so that the end user has little or no overhead in running the system.

In IMGS we have long been users of Office 365, and as someone who remembers when we used to have the headache of running our own exchange servers, Office 365 has been fantastic and provides access anywhere and is always available.

One of the big advantages of SAAS solutions, is the pay as you use model. With this model, customers don’t have to make a large capital expenditure up front for a software solution. This makes it easier in future to switch solutions if required and avoid a legacy IT trap where customers can’t afford to switch off platforms.

In IMGS again we have experience of this, when recently we moved from Salesforce to Zoho. We were able to switch seamlessly and migrate from one system to other in 2 days with no downtime or outages – if these solutions were on premise this would have been a lot more expensive to do.

 

Provide true resilience for continuity and disaster recovery purposes
One huge advantage for moving to the cloud is in providing true resilience and disaster recovery options. With cloud systems, you can select to have cloned systems in different regions to make sure that if there is a major outage, your organisation can continue to operate.

By selecting high availability options, you can ensure your users are never offline no matter where they are in the world. With the increase in remote working, having systems that are not dependent on a single site or broadband connection is critical.

 

Provide elastic scale to handle peaks in demand
The real power of the cloud is the ability of cloud systems to scale quickly to meet increased demand. With on premise systems providing scalability can be very costly, as hardware needs to be purchased in advance and will sit idle when demand is low. With cloud you can scale up and only pay for what is needed.

With Serverless technology, cloud providers are bringing this scalability and availability to a new paradigm. Serverless allows organisations to build and run high availability applications and services, without worrying about provisioning, maintaining, and administering servers.

 

Query large datasets which have outgrown on premise data storage
A big driver to the cloud is the explosion of data growth. Putting it simply, large organisations do not have the capacity to store all this Big Data on premise and the cloud is now providing the only real option. Cloud providers can provide a wide variety of ways to store your data whether in low cost file storage such as Amazon S3 to data warehouses like Snowflake.

A big concern for users is Data Residency and where this data is stored. In Ireland we are very lucky with most of the cloud providers providing data centers in Ireland so we can ensure our data stays within Ireland and the EU to meet GDPR regulations. Also, with modern integration tools like Talend we can also take a hybrid approach and store sensitive data on premise and in a variety of best of breed cloud locations, so as not impact end users.

 

Take advantage of the latest AI and Machine Language analytics to gain rapid insight
The final reason to move to the cloud is to take advantage of the powerful machine learning and AI services that are available as cloud services and can deliver rapid insights in areas such as predictive maintenance and customer churn.

All the major cloud providers provide these capabilities, (for example Amazon SageMaker) as well specialist SAAS providers such as Databricks provide data science and analysis capabilities that on-premise systems just can’t match.

Summary
As I said at the beginning the cloud is not new and a lot of what I have discussed here is pretty obvious, but I do feel organisations haven’t fully embraced the cloud and I hope this blog might help your organisation begin their digital transformation by moving to the cloud.

If you would like to learn more about moving to the cloud please attend our upcoming moving to the cloud webinar where we will demonstrate using our Data Intelligence Platform how you can migrate to and take full advantage of the cloud:

 

Webinar: Migrate to the Cloud with IMGS

 

 

 

FME 2020 by Gavin Park, Lead Solutions Consultant IMGS

It’s likely that 2020 will be remembered for a long time so it is perhaps fitting that the focus on the FME 2020 release has been finding your data zen and making working with data even easier.

FME started 2020 ready to prove it had come of age and was no longer that geeky tool sat on the GIS computer, but was a tool that delivered across the whole organisation. 2020 has proven to be the year that has shown it can.

FME is for the Organisation

FME’s goal is to support individuals and organisations of any size with integrating departments, applications and systems. This is a goal that has become increasingly important, as organisations try to adapt to new ways of working and increased demands for data to meet new challenges.

FME is a scalable, flexible, secure, no code solution which means that it is well suited to helping our users respond to the new challenges they face, and letting them focus on solving these challenges not battling data or software problems. It is proving once again to be the swiss army knife of data management.

As organisations battle scaling for a remote workforce, with systems and applications tied up behind firewalls and VPN connections, you can seamlessly migrate on premise FME Server solutions to FME Cloud and benefit for anywhere access and rapid deployment and scaling. It can free you from your IT infrastructure headaches and help that data zen.

 

Readers and Writers:

The current situation has led to the need for many more organisations to need to share information and FME 2020 introduces two need formats that are perfect for web mapping. There is now support for the TopoJSON which is similar in concept to ArcInfo’s coverage format for those old enough to remember it! For those not, it is similar to GeoJSON but rather than shared boundaries being captured twice, the topology of the data is captured so that shared boundaries are stored once, reducing the amount of data needed and making it a great format for polygon datasets.

Alongside this, the technical preview of Mapbox Vector Tiles has been released, which allows web map tiles to be stored as vector features rather than as traditional raster tiles. This allows for fast rendering and the ability to manipulate the tile data within the client. They provide smaller data size than raster tiles so need less diskspace to store and less bandwidth to transmit. They are also faster to generate and aren’t restricted to specific zoom scales like raster tiles, which provides a smoother zoom experience and an end to pixelation. The example below shows a web vector tile map of Irish counties.

 

As part of the integration with Enterprise Cloud data in this release, the Snowflake Reader/Writer graduates from tech preview status. Snowflake is a cloud database platform that provides a modern data warehouse that is ideally suited for advanced data science, data lakes, and provides near infinite scaling thanks to being cloud native. Importantly it provides hosting of data within Ireland to provide geographical data security. This makes it the perfect partner to FME Cloud as both products remain within Irish jurisdiction but provide all the benefits of cloud-based platforms.

Alongside the Reader/Writer, FME has the ability to perform SQL queries against the data within the Cloud database at blistering speeds using the existing SQLCreator or SQLExecutor transformers.

Among the other new readers and writers introduced in this release and one that is of special interest for IMGS’s Hexagon users, is that FME now supports version 3 of the ECW format. ECW provides sophisticated compression for imagery, allowing large image mosaics to be stored efficiently with native pyramid support, that will not require tile caches. Version 3 of the format brings support for transparency, allowing irregular shaped images to be used more intuitively within applications.

Alongside this, more users are looking to Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Autodesk’s Revit software, as FME has now significantly improved native support for reading in Revit models, with the example here showing both a 3D view and a floor plan view from the same source data.

             

 

FME Server
On the Server side, FME automations have continued to be improved since their introduction in FME 2019. The initial release allowed for workflows that had traditionally been built, using the classic notifications capabilities in FME to be built within a graphical environment. This was a step change in usability, allowing complex multi workspace workflows to be clearly visualised.

With 2020 this can be extended even further with the introduction of the FME Server Automation Writer, which allows multiple messages to be sent from a Workspace to other parts of the workflow. This means it’s easier to pass messages or instructions between Workspaces within an automation, and allows Workspaces to be smaller and more focused, as well as opening up the opportunity for FME to maximise parallel processing based on the number of engines.

Ultimately it allows FME to interact more easily with other systems within an organisation, especially as more of these systems provide APIs to interact with. This allows FME to deliver event driven integration capabilities that let it plug into and inter-operate with departments and systems throughout an organisation. It’s no longer just running a bunch of schedule tasks overnight!

With many customers running key workflows through FME Server its more important than ever to know that these processes are running without problem, and through the power of webhooks it’s possible to integrate FME into Microsoft Teams to quickly flag up problems.

Not only that, but it’s possible with the OneDriveConnector transformer in FME, to have FME generate new reports, upload these to a Microsoft 365 OneDrive and then send a shareable link out to a Teams Channel for people to get the latest information.

The best bit is that this isn’t new to 2020 and is available in at least the last few major releases!

 

Server Apps
Server apps are another function that were introduced in FME 2019 but have been enhanced in 2020 with two of the most asked for features. This release sees the introduction of security to the web apps so you can control who has access to them, as well as the ability to have a web map to allow users draw geometry features that can be passed into a Workspace.

 

The map can also be replaced with your own choice of tile map, so you can add your own mapping into it to further customise the user experience and make it relevant to your own users. This allows for example, users to add large scale mapping to provide more context than provided by common map APIs.

Alongside this, is the ability to enable security on your Server App so that when a user tries to access it, they will be challenged to log in. This log-in is integrated with FME Server’s user management, which can be integrated with an organisations Active Directory to make rolling out secure apps across the organisation an effortless process.

 

Computer Vision
If you do find yourself at home with time to explore new ideas, then FME is expanding its capabilities into the field of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. There are connectors for Google, Azure and Amazon’s computer vision APIs amongst others.

FME provides a powerful tool for not only connecting to these tools to process the data, but also in the creation of training data to power the algorithms doing the analysis. Then having run the analysis, FME can push the insights out to the relevant downstream applications and data platforms.

So, if your fed of missing the delivery driver with the vital supply of toilet roll, pasta and gin you can hook FME up to your web cam and use its computer vision to spot them and alert you! You can find out how here.

 

2020 & Beyond!
That has just scratched the surface of what’s new and we’ve not even covered performance improvements like the upgraded Shapefile Reader/Writer, the new StatisticsCalculator interface and the ability to change the connection lines in Workbench!

Oh, and FME 2020 is the fastest FME release yet, so your workflows are not only easier to build, but with more power so they can run much faster too!

If you want to find out more don’t forget our FME World Tour has now moved to October 6th where we’ll also be showing what’s new in FME 2020.1. It will be worth the wait!

 

Sisense Bootcamp in Israel by Ellen Noone

On day one of the Sisense bootcamp in Tel Aviv Israel, myself and Ciaran arrived at the Atrium Tower to start our bootcamp. We were immediately wowed by the impressive skyscrapers and towers surrounding us. The building hosting us, had 40 floors and we were on floor 16. We were met by Einat Pick, the organiser of the bootcamp. We had a very welcoming reception where we were given goodie bags and the opportunity to speak to other Sisense partners, who were also attending the bootcamp from all around the world.

 

 

 

From day one to four we were given the opportunity to listen to a large variety of different Sisense staff members, who all had various roles within the company including one of the founders, who gave a great overview of how Sisense came to be, from a college project to a billion dollar company.

These speakers each gave a different insight into Sisense and how the company works. Some of the topics covered include product updates (including glimpses into future releases), Sisense Alliance Partnerships, Prospecting and Creating a demand and many other topics.

My personal favourite topic was Prospecting and Creating demand which was presented by Yaniv Matan Levy. I found Yaniv to be a greatly enthusiastic speaker, also very clear and informative. We were given the opportunity to ask questions at the end of each session in order to iron out any queries and find out as much as we can about the various topics. I learned a lot on this trip, which I feel I can take advantage of in my role at IMGS.

After the bootcamp on Day one, we were brought out for a lovely dinner to the Kitchen Market by the Sisense team, along with the other Sisense partners. The restaurant we attended was facing the beach and provided beautiful views. This was a great opportunity to get to know the other Sisense Partners and create relationships with the partners as well as the Sisense team. This was a thoroughly enjoyable evening and great fun. The Sisense team got everyone involved in various games at the dinner, to break the ice and get everyone chatting to one another. We played Kahoot! A popular quiz game which was known to many at the dinner. It was interesting to listen to others and their experience with Sisense and various tips they have for being a partner with Sisense.

Every day of the bootcamp we were provided with a generous lunch by the Sisense team. At lunch time we also got the opportunity to network and get to know everyone at the bootcamp. Everyone was great fun and extremely friendly.

 

After the bootcamp on day 2 I travelled to a famous shopping centre called Dizengoff  Centre. I was eager to see what the shops were like in the middle east! The shopping centre was across 3 floors and included many shops which we have in Ireland, including Zara!

I also got to enjoy the stunning views from our hotel roof top both before and after the bootcamp in either the morning or the evening.  Our hotel was in an ideal location along with being very comfortable and modern.

 

 

 

Overall, my trip to Israel for the Sisense Bootcamp was extremely successful and I am really excited about what Sisense can do for our customers. I really enjoyed Israel and hope to return one day!

Ellen Noone, Business Development Representative, IMGS.

 

Can you describe your role at IMGS?

My role at IMGS is Business Development Representative, it revolves around lead generation.  I am new to the role & I really enjoy it so far!

 

If you were stuck on a desert island, what 3 pieces of tech could you not live without?

Without a doubt my iPhone it’s never far from my reach!  My hair straightener because I hate my hair when it’s curly, and probably a coffee machine because I am a serious coffee addict ever since I started working in IMGS!

 

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I like to go to the gym after work when I can, but since the Covid-19 restrictions were introduced my gym has been closed, so I have taken up jogging every evening and hopefully it lasts!

 

What’s the best place you’ve travelled to and why?

It would have to be Ibiza. I lived in Ibiza for a Summer and there is so much more to Ibiza besides the nightlife, it is a beautiful Island with stunning sites and scenery.  I made great memories and friends while living there.

 

What’s your favourite Blog?

I don’t read blogs that often! If I was to read a blog it would probably be from a social media influencer.

 

What do you enjoy most about working at IMGS?

100% the staff and the atmosphere that the mix of people bring to the office!

Talend Engage Conference by Garrett Cronin

Ciaran Kirk & I were fortunate to attend the Talend engage conference in New Orleans last month. The event saw Talend staff, partners and customers from across the globe converge on the Marriot New Orleans for three days of networking, information sharing and to get inspired with Talend.

Ciaran & I arrived late in the evening after nearly 20 hours of travelling, and found the partner showcase in full swing. We quickly dropped off our cases in our rooms and went straight downstairs to man our IMGS table. It was an amazing opening night with nearly a thousand people in attendance.

Christal Bemont, Talend’s new CEO kicked off on Wednesday morning. Christal spoke about her background and her ambitious vision for the company over the next three years. Ann-Christal, Talend’s new CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) then spoke about her vision to grow and how they will be supporting staff and partners to grow with them. Finally, to close the opening session Jamie Kiser, Talend’s new CCO (Chief Customer Officer), stated if they are to achieve the ambitious goals set out by Christal, their customer engagement needs to be first in class. She went on to speak about some of her initiatives for customer success, which will enable customers to get frictionless support from Talend and its partners.

Ciaran Dynes, the SVP of Product at Talend and fellow Irish Man from Co. Wicklow, opened the second day along with Laurent Bride, Talend’s COO & CTO. The pair spoke about the product road map for Data Fabric for this coming year, and gave us an exciting glimpse into the future. It was clear from their excitement they are passionate about the future of the platform and the problems it will solve for organisations big and small.
Naturally, I can’t give anything away just yet, but Cloud is still at the forefront of their endeavours, along with improving the customer’s experience to reduce time to insight.
They went on to speak about how important it is for them (Talend) to keep looking forward and innovating, Ciaran Dynes spoke about data over the last 10 years and how rapidly it is changing and shaping organisations.

The emergence of Big Data, IoT, Predictive Analytics and Natural Language Recognition has seen a shift in how organisations view data. Titles like Data Engineer, Chief Data Office and Data Scientist are now common roles in nearly every organisation. Data is also being discussed at a senior or board level, as organisations understand it is an asset that they can leverage to increase sales, improve performance and gain a competitive edge in the market.

Finally, Ciaran Dynes also said Data isn’t the new oil, oil can only be consumed once. Data however can be consumed multiple times and the more data you consume the more valuable it becomes. I feel this is a fairer description of data in the current climate.

Throughout the conference, Talend customers spoke about their journey to become more data driven. Customers like Stanley Black & Decker, Siemens, Royal Caribbean Cruises and Lowe’s to names a small few.

Lowe’s for example have 2,000 home improvement stores that generated $68 Billion in 2018, they have 310,000 employees and are one of the leading suppliers in America. They used Talend to move from on prem to the cloud so they could leverage real-time big data.
Siemens also spoke about how data analytics powers every aspect of their global organisation. I personally never knew Siemens was such a large company, $89 Billion in revenue, 330,000 employees and 400,000,000,000 data records!

All the customer stories were amazing but Royal Caribbean Cruises really stood out to me. I never thought of a cruise ship as a floating 200TB Data Centre! Combine the complexity of this with the fact that they run off satellite broadband (traditionally very slow), the ship is moving and the reflection from the sea also affects the stability of their connectivity.

They went on to speak about the use of data on their modern Smart Ships, which have Google Assistant built into cabins for ordering room service or booking seats for an onboard show or activity. They also use facial recognition to speed up the process for guests disembarking and boarding at different ports along their trip. All of this data has to be GDPR compliant, so the information is automatically ammonised at the end of a guest’s trip.

It was a fascinating glimpse into their business and how Talend has supported them with data ingestion, data quality, data governance and predictive analytics. Talend allowed them to get out of their “Legacy Trap”, so they could leverage modern technology to personalise a passengers experience, predict & suggest new experiences, gain new insights and finally improve passenger security while protecting their passengers privacy.

Thank you for reading our blog and if you’d like to hear more about Talend and what it can do for you and your organisation, please don’t hesitate to reach out, Ciaran is dying to show off his Talend Super Powers!

Gavin Park, Lead Solution Consultant, IMGS

 

Can you describe your role at IMGS?
Probably what most people will know me for here is training and consultancy on Safe Software’s FME products, as that tends to keep me busy and out seeing our different customers.  Its also been a great way to see different parts of Ireland!  Though I’m getting more involved with projects and helping to design our solutions for customers, which is allowing me to use some more of my previous technical lead and solution architecture experience.

 

If you were stuck on a desert island, what 3 pieces of tech could you not live without?
It’s a cliché I guess but I’d definitely be lost without my iPhone!  I take it totally for granted but it has everything from my email, music, maps, camera, flight tickets, to letting me pay for dinner, plus it lets me stay in touch with home when travelling.

I always love to have my Kindle with me when I travel as its one of the few times, I get to actually read these days and I no longer have to worry about books sending me over my carry-on limits!

I’m just hoping the island has power and 4G reception, so I guess the third would have to be a satellite link with a usb-charger!

 

What do you like to do in your spare time?
When I get some, I like walking, photography and spending time in the pub.  I’m lucky in that living near the countryside means that there are plenty of photogenic walks that might have the odd pub or two along the way!

 

What’s the best place you’ve travelled to and why?
Well Ireland obviously! But after that it’s a hard one as I’ve been lucky enough to travel to some great locations over the years. British Columbia and Vancouver has to be high on the list as it’s a beautiful part of the world with some great memories, but the best place probably has to be the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu.  It’s such a spectacular location and the trail really gives you a chance to appreciate the landscape and culture.

 

What would you do (for a career) if you weren’t doing this?
I suppose I’m lucky in that I enjoy what I do, so I’ve never really thought too hard about an alternative career.  Though I’ve always liked the idea of being an international travel/landscape photographer, sadly I fear it would be a short lived career as my photography is definitely more Instagram than National Geographic!

 

What do you enjoy most about working at IMGS?
It has to be the people here at IMGS but also the customers as well.  There is a really great team here that make coming into the office something to look forward to, and its been great to get out and meet our customers as well as see all the interesting things they are trying to do with our software.  It’s meant that the job is always interesting and challenging!

Aditya Dhote, ETL Engineer, IMGS

 

Can you describe your role at IMGS?

My role is a mix of Pre-sales Technical and Data Engineering.  In that capacity, I spend most of the day juggling between POCs on Talend, Snowflake and delivering ongoing development projects.

 

How long have you worked in IMGS?

Completed 375 days or ≈ 261* working days at the time of filling this out
(* Does not exclude annual leave).  P.S. – Working on data makes you quantitative.

 

What music are you currently listening to on your phone?

Random. I just play any of recommended playlist on Gaana.com. It’s an app with alot of Indian music.  I have also listened to Ed Sheeran – Cross Me recently and liked it.

 

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I sleep. If not sleeping, I binge watch YouTube (Business Insider is my new fav channel), Short films on Netflix and sometimes, I cook too.
Ohh, wait, books, I try reading books as well, but hardly manage to finish one from start to end.  I am currently trying “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman.

 

Where’s your favourite place in the world?

I am not specific, but any place where I can find mouth-watering food, my close friends & family and tropical beaches has to be one.

 

If you could learn to do anything what would it be?

Swimming and playing Tabla. Read again, if you read it as Table! It’s a membranophone percussion instrument originating from the Indian subcontinent, consisting of a pair of drums, used in traditional, classical and popular music.
No! I am not an expert commentator on music, just copied the description from Wikipedia. 😃

 

What do you enjoy most about working at IMGS?

I get to work on different problems, each POC is unique, be it requirements, business use case or software platform.
Our client data is growing and so is the challenge to manage and analyse it efficiently. There is something new to learn every day, the team is supportive and fun to work with and we now have a PlayStation aswell – I just have to master Fortnite now!

Safe Software Summit 2019

By Garrett Cronin, Senior Account Manager IMGS

I was fortunate enough to be able to travel to this year’s Safe Software Partner Summit in Vancouver. The annual Safe Software Partner Summit is the largest meeting of Safe Software staff and partners from around the world. As per previous years, it was hosted in the beautiful Convention Centre in Downtown Vancouver. The venue boasts breath-taking views of the bay and is flanked by highrise buildings.

 

I arrived a day early to take advantage of the pre-conference training. I did a reduced version of the introduction to FME Desktop & FME Server training courses. I proudly created my first ever (working) FME Workspace. The workspace took multiple source files containing local area information and 311 call data. 311 in Canada is the number you call to request services from your city or to report an issue like illegal dumping. My workspace merged the data, did some cleansing of poor-quality records and then wrote them out to a Google KLM to be viewed in Google Earth. The end user could click on the different polygons and get statistical information on the number of calls for that area etc.

 

If you are a seasoned FME user you my laugh at how basic that is but for me, I was so proud of what I achieved and slightly disappointed Don & Dale didn’t offer me a job right there on the spot to lead their technical team!! 😊

The following day the dynamic Don & Dale kicked off the conference welcoming over 70 partners from every corner of the globe to the summit. It was a short welcome as they were excited to introduce this year’s keynote speaker Tiffani Bova. Tiffani is the growth & innovation evangelist at Salesforce. Among a whole host of accomplishments, Tiffani is one of the top 100 women in Tech and one of Brand Quarterly Magazine’s Top 50 Marketing Thought Leaders.

Tiffani spoke about the trends in the marketplace and how the digital age is forcing people and organisations to adapt rapidly to stay relevant in their respected fields.

She went on to say that “Get Comfortable being Uncomfortable” if you want to continue to challenge yourself and grow in your professional career.

Don & Dale returned to the stage to speak about their humble beginnings nearly 25 years ago, and their vision of the future.

FME is no longer just a geospatial ETL tool but rather a powerful Data Integration Platform. Looking at its functionality today nearly 25 years on, it supports ETL (Bulk/Batch), Message Oriented Encapsulation, Data Synchronisation, Data Replication, Data Migration, Data Preparation, Data Access & Ingression. All of which are the core functionalities of a powerful data integration platform.

Over the coming months and years Safe Software is going to bolster this message and support customers to use FME for more than its base geospatial functionality.

The week included a variety of talks, training, and workshops focused on different aspects of growing the use of FME in your local markets. For the first time, Safe Software offered multiple tracks with both technical and business talks, so attendees could tailor their schedules to their interests.

The agenda included:

• Plenaries and future roadmaps from Safe’s founders, Don and Dale.
• Technical talks and deep dives from FME Experts.
• Industry updates from Product Marketing.
• Business tips from our Sales, Marketing, and Events teams.
• Round-table discussions and panels with expert staff and partners.
• Hands-on training workshops with FME Experts.

Safe also had the FME Doctor’s Office running each day so attendees could get hands-on help with solving their FME challenges.

The week ended on Friday with a BBQ in Safe Software’s new office. Last year we were taken on a tour, but it was still a bare shell at that stage, what they transformed it into is nothing but amazing!

 

If you would like to experience a week like I had, or if you have you ever wondered how many other FME enthusiasts there are in the world, and what they are doing with FME –  Come find out at the FME International User Conference (FME UC 2020)!

This conference will gather hundreds of the world’s top data experts to exchange knowledge, transform your skills, and get inspired with FME Desktop & Server.

If you’d like to come along simply contact me directly and we can discuss how we can achieve this together.

Stephen Coll, Helpdesk Manager IMGS

 

Can you describe your role at IMGS?

I’m the Helpdesk Manager at IMGS, when an issue arises then I’m the first point of contact to provide support and manage the issues through to solution for our clients.  So, it’s a bit like a jack of all trades……but I’ve mastered the coffee machine.

 

How long have you worked here?

I started at the end of April so only a few months, and hopefully many more…. watch this space!!!

 

If you were stuck on a desert island, what 3 pieces of tech could you not live without?

Well first I’d have my phone, it would be like the modern day swiss army knife, great to take some snaps and upload them to let people know where I am and to raise the alarm. Might even get a food delivery app to work!!!

Second would be a solar powered charger to charge the phone, since the food delivery might take some time and it would be a shame to miss the delivery.

Third a drone, be handy to take some nice sunset snaps, survey the land and could be used as a cooling fan during the midday heat.

 

What do you like to do in your spare time?

Heading off exploring the hills of Ireland during the nice weather, or spending a few hours cooking if the weather is typically Irish.  Then a trip to a bar to see live local bands with a few pints (optional, banter mandatory).

 

Where’s your favourite place in the world?

On that desert island watching the sunset and listening to the gentle sounds of the water or anywhere else where I can do the same, preferably less deserted.

 

What’s the most recent App you’ve downloaded but are yet to use?

I’ve just got a new phone so the list off apps is minimal, although some of the preinstalled apps I’ve yet to figure out like Bixby!? Never heard of it before.

 

What do you enjoy most about working at IMGS?

First and foremost are the people, you couldn’t ask for a better team of people to work with. Everyone is helpful and very welcoming into what can only be described as the IMGS family, hats off to you all. It’s been a great welcome for this wee culchie moving to big city of Dublin.  Then there is the ability to train and upskill with the company which is a big bonus. (PS that coffee machine I’ve mastered has very nice coffee too).

 

Sreedevi Ramanujan, Applications Engineer IMGS

 

Can you describe your role at IMGS?

I am an applications engineer working primarily on solutions development in .Net technology and GIS software.

 

How long have you worked here?

6 months.  I joined IMGS in July 2018.

 

Before working at IMGS, what was the most unusual or interesting job you’ve ever had?

My first job out of college was as an Assistant System Engineer Trainee. I’ve spent over 5 years in the same career, so haven’t had the chance to work in an unusual job yet.

 

What do you like to do on the weekends?   

I like to wander through the city exploring different cuisines. Sometimes I  go to the movies or on road trips if the weather is good.  I love to binge watch Netflix if spending my weekend at home.

 

Where’s your favourite place in the world?

Alleppy, a town in India. I love its picturesque backwaters, houseboats and exotic beaches with coconut palm trees.

 

What’s your favourite blog?

I like to read travel blogs.  Especially the ones with mind blowing photography.  One of my favourites is National Geographic’s travel.

 

What do you enjoy most about working at IMGS?

Definitely the friendly team in IMGS and the opportunity to learn.