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What We Do

We get our customers in touch with their data using industry leading products, such as Visual Command Center® from Everbridge, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft SQL Server® and Microsoft SharePoint®. We improve how our customers manage, process, view, and analyze their data so they can see the whole picture and gain the insight their business needs. We have decades of experience in spatial data management and analysis, which we focus on two main business competencies:

Generating internet data streams for visualization & risk alerting
Customized solution development to maximize our customers use of information

About Us

Who We Are

ICI Innovations was formed by Corey Tucker and Colin Taylor, who for over 25 years have provided geospatial solutions for industry and governments. Since 2014, we have delivered solutions for customers in North America, South America and Europe that include:

Vessel tracking (AIS) and visualization
Operational risk intelligence and response
Content management and visualization to support pipeline inspections
Data exploration and visualization related to offshore oil and gas activities
Operations & regulatory compliance for critical assets
Field operations planning, visualization and analysis
Data exploration and visualization to support public policy planning

Corey Tucker

President

Colin Taylor

Vice President

Our Partners

Microsoft

Certified for Visual Fusion®
Visual Command Center®
and Microsoft SharePoint®

Our Solutions

At ICI Innovations, we use technology from leading vendors to create solutions for operational risk intelligence, geospatial content management and data visualization.

Visual Command Center® provides a real-time, common operating picture of your assets, personnel and operations in relation to potential risks. When a risk is detected near an asset or employee location, Visual Command Center automatically generates an alert and provides tools to assess and take immediate action to mitigate the impact. This empowers your team to know early, know the situation and know to act.

ICI Innovations is a premier Value Added Reseller for Everbridge and has certified staff to develop and support solutions that require Visual Command Center®. Customers have a choice of using hosted solutions, which can be configured to their unique requirements, or have a solution deployed within their own infrastructure if third party hosting is not an option.

Some of Our Work

Case Study: Nalcor Energy
"I don’t know of anyone in our part of the industry using anything like this, where all the data can be shown on one map. The ‘wow’ factor is big in presentations.” Mike White, Nalcor Energy

Case Study: Nalcor Energy

Overview

Nalcor Energy is a major energy and utility corporation in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. A Crown corporation, Nalcor is charged with leading the management and development of the province’s energy resources.

Current offshore oil and gas projects are concentrated in the Jeanne d’Arc Basin 200 miles (340 km) off the Newfoundland and Labrador coast, but more oil and gas discoveries may be waiting in other basins that are comparatively underexplored. To find and deliver new resources in these basins, Nalcor Energy is executing an exploration strategy based on global best practices. Under this strategy, in 2010 the company invested in two scientific studies in the Canadian North Atlantic: first a satellite study of natural oil seeps on the ocean surface, then one of the largest seismic surveys ever done of the ocean floor. (Seismic data is the primary data used in exploration drilling decisions.)

Problem

Nalcor Energy’s Exploration Department needed a system for managing the seismic data and other geoscience information it collects so that company knowledge and insight on the potential of these offshore areas could be captured, preserved and effectively communicated. But seismic data is complex, and difficult for non-specialists to interpret in its native formats. The company also wanted to connect this data to other information it possessed: data about existing and planned wells and platforms, reports supporting geologists’ interpretations of the seismic data, and a system of scores assigned to the basins based on their potential. This diverse information resided in a huge collection of spreadsheets, databases, GIS files, and in industry-specific software that only a handful of Nalcor Energy’s employees could use. To manage and present the data, the Exploration Department had created an interactive PowerPoint document. After a year and a half, it contained over 800 linked slides. And with more wells being drilled, and more seismic data on the way, it was growing.

Solution

Nalcor Energy originally deployed Visual Fusion, a platform for building map-based solutions that organizations can use to increase strategic insight and make informed decisions. Recently ICI Innovations completed the migration of Nalcor Energy’s Exploration Strategy System (NESS) from Visual Fusion to Visual Command Center- the visualization and orchestration component of Everbridge’s Critical Event ManagementTM platform that helps provide a common operating picture and helps mitigate or eliminate the impact of risk for organizations.

Benefits

Nalcor and its employees benefit from Visual Command Center through:
A single, easy-to-access location for all intelligence information.
Visual Command Center consolidates more than 40 layers of unique data, bringing together everything from geophysicists’ reports to well status and production figures. Users can filter and drill down through this data to find exactly what they want using easily understood controls like checkboxes and radio buttons. New data and data sources can be added to the solution with minimal effort.
The solution integrated Nalcor Energy’s existing information from multiple sources, in multiple formats without requiring complicated data migration processes.
A quality user interface that enables compelling presentations.

The solution provides a compelling overview of Nalcor’s interpretation of possible oil and gas deposits, then lets users show the seismic data and analysis documents that support the interpretation.

“I don’t know of anyone in our part of the industry using anything like this, where all the data can be shown on one map,” said White. “The ‘wow’ factor is big in presentations.”

For a public view of the VCC application, please visit: http://exploration.nalcorenergy.com/ness/overview.

Canadian electric utility streamlines infrastructure analysis with GIS visualization.
Newfoundland Power leverages opportunity to improve Information Management with a rapidly implemented Visual Fusion solution.

Canadian electric utility streamlines infrastructure analysis with GIS visualization.

Overview

Newfoundland Power leverages opportunity to improve Information Management with a rapidly implemented Visual Fusion solution.
With only a short period of time to work with a massive collection of data, Newfoundland Power chose Visual Fusion to manage the data from a survey of utility poles that was undertaken conjointly with the province’s primary telecommunications company in 2011. Using out-of-the-box features, developers quickly created an application that displays the location and characteristics of the more than 300,000 poles, enabling them to check the validity of survey results, and in the future making the data easily available to employees working in the field.

Situation

Newfoundland Power serves the majority of electricity consumers in Canada’s province of Newfoundland and Labrador, providing power to more than 243,000 customers on the island portion of the province. The company’s distribution lines are carried on approximately 300,000 utility poles, many of them with attachments from local telecommunications and cable television companies.

As part of a joint use pole agreement with the primary telecommunications company in the province, a survey was commissioned to determine the location, attributes, condition, and services attached for each pole. To confirm the survey’s accuracy Newfoundland Power was required to perform QA checks on a sample of poles. Without a tool to display poles and pole information geographically on a map managing this QA would be very challenging.

“They had no capability to review that data other than spreadsheets,” explained Corey Tucker, Senior GIS Consultant with Tamarack Geographic Technologies Ltd., a consulting firm engaged by Newfoundland Power. “It was really hampering them. They were unable to gain confidence in what was being collected.”

Solution

Even before the pole survey, Newfoundland Power had been investigating how it could benefit from the use of GIS technology. The survey offered an opportunity to further understand the potential value of GIS technologies in a real world situation. Working with its consultant, Tamarack, the company considered several alternatives for providing insight into the pole survey data, ultimately selecting Visual Fusion.

Visualizing the poles makes it easier to send field crews to the precise locations.

“Quick implementation was a big factor in choosing Visual Fusion,” said Tucker. “The goal was to get the application designed, developed, and deployed in six to eight weeks. Our hope was to use out-of-the-box features and minimize custom programming.”

Thanks to Visual Fusion’s robust feature set, the company was able to meet its goal. Instead of spreadsheets, a SQL Server 2008 database was deployed to contain the survey results. Through Visual Fusion’s SQL Server connector, end users can view and update the survey data.

In the company’s Pole Management application, users can see the exact location of each pole, its type, height, age, condition, ownership, and what services (cable, phone, or power) are attached. To direct field personnel to a specific structure, they can share a favorite view, or email an image created with Visual Fusion’s Label and Snapshot tools.

“Many of the end users at this company are not GIS experts. They’re familiar with consumer services like Google maps and Bing maps. The Visual Fusion application provides the possibility of an easy-to-use tool for everyone across the enterprise.

Newfoundland Powers’ Pole Management application gives users with no GIS experience easy access to location data, with no training needed.

Newfoundland Power and the telecommunications company will divide the poles into management areas, which users can edit and view in the application. By selecting any of these polygons, staff can do an instant spatial query to list the poles in the area, or view comprehensive reports by accessing SQL Server reporting services within Microsoft SharePoint. While nearly all of the application uses out-of-the-box features, the company elected to add custom code to calculate and display the average pole age and the number of poles for each service provider, a modification Tamarack was able to easily make for them.

With a single click, users can perform a spatial query on any pole management area

More out-of-the-box features let the company’s users filter poles in multiple ways, and display a graph of the distribution of poles by age.

An interface for everyone

In addition to rapid implementation, other factors influenced the company’s choice of Visual Fusion. A primary one was the Visual Fusion interface, which employees could use with little or no training.

“Many of the end users at this company are not GIS experts,” Tucker said. “They’re familiar with consumer services like Google maps and Bing maps. The Visual Fusion application provides an easy-to-use tool for everyone across the enterprise.”

Other factors were Visual Fusion’s array of data connectors and deep SharePoint integration. Because Newfoundland Power uses SharePoint extensively, many data sources in its IT infrastructure can be brought into the Visual Fusion solution quickly.

Users can filter data in multiple ways. Filters are enabled through configuration and require no custom code.

Conclusion

By choosing Visual Fusion, Newfoundland Power was able to perform QA of the pole survey findings, and provide its users with meaningful access to the pole survey results. Using mainly out-of-the-box features, Tamarack and the company implemented the application on time and employees could use it with no formal training. Thanks to its data connectors and available SDK, Visual Fusion also gives the company flexibility to solve many different problems in the future. Tucker indicated, “Visual Fusion has the potential to become the standard way anyone in this organization views spatial data”.