Cloudpoint earns Designation as Indoor Mapping Specialist

Becoming an Esri Business Partner was a key to fueling company growth and opening doors to new opportunities. “Our company’s partnership with Esri has boosted our name recognition and allowed for expertise to be noticed on a national verses regional scale.” says founder and CEO, Jonathan Hodel. Now this partnership blossoms once again as Cloudpoint announces they have received their ArcGIS Indoors specialty designation. This process involves completing an application to Esri and then demonstrating the company’s capabilities for indoor mapping by providing real-world examples of implementing this robust solution. This is the fourth Esri ArcGIS specialty designation that the company has received adding to its current accolades which include Local Government, ArcGIS Online, and Release Readiness designations.

A sample snapshot of indoor mapping application ready to provide asset information or turn-by-turn walking directions. Easily select a building and floor level for easy navigation across a campus. You can image the power of this technology as we mitigate the return-to-work process following the COVID-19 pandemic. Things like space management, foot traffic patterns, route planning, and room cleaning updates can all be tracked via an active Indoor GIS system.

Implementing the ArcGIS Indoors solution across an organization, especially a campus-wide project, requires expertise in several areas of GIS including Enterprise GIS deployment, data conversion of CAD or BIM files, GNSS collection for control points, 3D laser scanning equipment, drone imagery, data curation in ArcGIS Pro, publishing web layers, and more. The Cloudpoint team has experience in bringing all of these capabilities together in a seamless fashion to create an immersive interactive campus experience for the end user.

The end results can be as simple as using Esri’s Indoors web application template along with their Indoors native mobile app, or expanded to include a robust customized GIS interface having the ability to integrate with monitoring sensors and real-time location system (RTLS). For many years, GIS has continued to transform the way people engage with locational data and indoor facility mapping will be the catalyst for engaging in more detail in the future.

For more information on how your organization can harness the power of GIS indoors, visit our Indoors page or contact our team of professionals at 877-377-8124.

Welcome Aboard, Hunter Ray!

Introduction:

We are yet again able to add on another employee to our team and we are excited to announce that it is Hunter Ray! He does not come to Cloudpoint as a stranger but actually a familiar face from past conferences. His title is GIS Analyst and he will start off by aiding Micah and the Enterprise team along with some application development work.

We are fortunate to find someone with Hunter’s education and experience.

Education:

He has a Bachelors Degree in Zoology from SIU Carbondale and a Master's in GIS from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He says one of his greatest and proudest moments was obtaining his Master’s with a 4.0 GPA while working full-time.

Work Experience:

His work experience includes work for the USDA Wildlife Services agency in Illinois as a Wildlife Biologist/GIS Specialist. Hunter spent 8.5 years as a biologist specializing in airport wildlife management, along with being in charge of developing and maintaining GIS products while providing training and support for his fellow field staff.

Accomplishments:

Hunter had the opportunity to serve as the GIS Team Lead during a FEMA Emergency Response event for flooding disaster in the spring of 2019. He also has earned a USDA’s Secretary’s Award, USDA Administrator’s Award, Gears of Government award, and two Merit awards for his professional assistance.

Hobbies & Interests:

In his leisure, Hunter enjoys hunting, golfing, keeping up with the PGA Tour, and listening to music. Snow-skiing in the winter is a must for him. He and his wife, Ariel, also love to hike, exercise at the gym, and cook together.

A Name That Says It All!

Cloudpoint has gone through various internal changes so far this year; from adapting to remote work, to investing in AWS services to optimize our use of ArcGIS Indoors and Enterprise, to expanding our virtual training efforts with free webinars. After much consideration by the team, we are ready to publicly announce our new name as Cloudpoint Geospatial. This new name better describes the services that we provide and more accurately encompasses our overall purpose. Included in this blog is a video announcement of our company founder, Jonathan Hodel, welcoming on this exciting change and explaining the why behind it.

We hope you’ll take a second to watch our announcement video.

Even though our name has changed, we still strive to fulfill the same mission and purpose.

In this video, Cloudpoint Geospatial founder, Jonathan Hodel, describes the meaning of 'Geospatial' as the company changes its name from Geographics to Geosp...

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Our Mission:

Find fulfillment in serving people throughout the world by teaching them the value of spatial data and utilizing it to enhance each other’s daily lives.

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Our Purpose:

We are here to provide tools & services that enable organizations to make informed, data-driven decisions based on spatial location.

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Congrats to Jodi, Matt, and Tyler!

Jodi, Tyler, and Matt have been a part of the team for 5 years! Though they all have differing roles, they each surpass their work titles to serve both staff and clients. It’s evident that these three will drop what their doing to help you. Jodi, Tyler, and Matt, you have been crucial in providing quality services to clients and keeping Cloudpoint well and thriving.

Tyler (Left), Matt, and Jodi pictured outside our office.

In separate interviews with all 3 employees, they all said there favorite thing about working at Cloudpoint was the rest of the staff and the fun that we have together. These answers spoke louder than I thought to who we are and what we stand for are here.

We have had many staff lunches, Friday afternoon mini-golf games, and laughs together in our normal days’ work. It is clear that we are not just co-workers but a team here at Cloudpoint.

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Jodi at her desk ready to greet clients or staff returning from lunch with a smile.

Jodi:

She is a jack of many trades here at Cloudpoint. Her duties range anywhere from administrative to bookkeeping to marketing. Jodi enjoys doing the books the most out her daily duties. In a typical day, she makes trips to the bank, works on marketing lists, answers the phone, approves time-sheets, and much more. She has many responsibilities behind the scene that allow us to work with ease knowing she’s got our back.

Jodi, her husband, and 3 boys plan to visit each state. This year they planned to go to California, Oregon, and Washington and now they are waiting to see if COVID-19 guidelines change. Her family loves to spend time outside in sunny or snowy weather by going hiking or skiing.

Thank you, Jodi, for your dedication to making sure that everyone, staff or client, is taken care of! Your work does not go unnoticed!

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Tyler pictured here using Collector on the IPad which is connected to the Trimble R2 GNSS to gather GNSS data.

Tyler:

Tyler bounces between working in the office and doing field work. His titles are GIS Technician and Drone (UAV) Pilot. He has helped with culvert and sign inventories, overhauling utility networks, and much more. Out of Tyler’s array of duties his favorite in GNSS Data Collection.

Outside of work, Tyler is a student at Illinois Central College studying Geography which keeps him busy during the school year. He will be finishing his associates in science this fall. In his leisure, he also enjoys playing Frisbee golf.

Thank you Tyler for your hard work and willingness to always give a helping hand!

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Matt:

Matt provides a lot of our managed services for clients. Even on days he is not at a client site, you can often find him on a call or fulfilling a request someone has sent to him. However Matt says he loves the variety of work for which we are grateful. Aside from managed services, Matt does a majority of the work for our Parcel fabric clients. He is also the leader of our Parcel Fabric team.

Matt makes sure to keep up with sports such as baseball, and basketball. He is also a coach for his son’s baseball team this year. Though not a sport, he also enjoys hiking, getting outside, and live music.

Thank you, Matt for all you do in keeping up with our managed services clients as well as the diligence you put forth in your work!

Matt is pictured here diligently assisting one of our county clients with parcel fabric data maintenance.

Cloudpoint hosting free webinars with GIS training!

The Cloudpoint team is taking advantage of this time of remote connectivity to connect with you in a whole new way.  Our professional GIS experts will be hosting a series of exciting GIS webinars to help users take advantage of the latest GIS resources. Although we can’t meet in person right now, here is a list of our upcoming virtual events that you won’t want to miss out on.  Be sure to join our team for some high-impact learning opportunities to see how your organization can benefit from GIS!

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How to Maintain Your Cemetery Records with GIS

Check out the recording HERE!

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Overcoming your fear of ArcGIS Pro

Check out the recording HERE!

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Upgrading Your Enterprise GIS: What It Means and How to Keep Up

Check out the recording HERE!

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What Facility Managers Need to know about GIS

Check out the recording HERE!

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Critical GIS Infrastructure Every Public Works Department Should Have

Check out the recording HERE!

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How to Manage your Sign Inventory in the Cloud!

Check out the recording HERE!

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Introduction to Parcel Fabric in ArcGIS Pro

Check out the recording HERE!

Two New Videos for Remote Workers

Since we are all working at home these days. It makes sense to think that some GIS workers will be trying to connect to their enterprise GIS. If you do not have a VPN or the connection is spotty, you may want to try and connecting to the data through ArcGIS Portal. Micah created two short videos to help with this task. You will need to know your ArcGIS Portal home URL, a username and licensed copy of ArcGIS Pro.

https://youtu.be/QHD5BrZx7Oc

During the Stay Home mandate from the COVID-19 coronavirus, it is essential to continue connecting to our enterprise GIS systems. This video will help show h...

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This next video shows you how to connect ArcGIS Pro to open and public REST endpoints. This will enable you to add published data to your map regardless of the source.

If you need to know where to find REST endpoints check out this BLOG post from a few months back.

https://youtu.be/vRqo7Yzxbmo

During the Stay Home mandate from the COVID-19 coronavirus, it is essential to continue connecting to our enterprise GIS systems. This video will help show h...

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Cloudpoint Now Offering Services Living up to its namesake

It’s rather interesting, some of the comments we get about the name of our company when people are first introduced to us. They say “Cloudpoint, hmm, is that some kind of cloud-based service, do you work with point clouds, etc.?” As company founder Jonathan Hodel notes, “when we started up in 2011, my wife, Megan and I were discussing several options for names and wanted something that spoke to the technology we are using. As a geospatial company, I knew point clouds were a key part of the services we were offering but at the same time ‘the cloud’ was becoming a popular way to store, manage, and process data.” Proof of this can be found in the fact that company adopted use of the cloud as a way of doing business right from the start.

Using file storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive, then in 2012 becoming an Esri Business Partner and launching its first ArcGIS Server environment in a completely cloud-hosted environment on Amazon’s AWS platform, Cloudpoint is putting its money where its name is. Hodel states, “I like to be able to tell people we’ve never actually ‘owned’ a server and have never had a box in the back room”. At first hearing this, you might think they’ve saved tons of money on hardware and networking costs over the years, however that’s not necessarily the case as the company has invested almost $50,000 in AWS services alone between Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2’s), S3 storage, and Workspaces. Now the company uses multiple AWS EC2 servers for tasks such as testing and deployment of new ArcGIS Enterprise software packages, project work needing multi-editor environments, and even staging environments for new applications such as Esri’s ArcGIS Indoors.

Now the company is excited to announce its latest service offering of cloud-hosted GIS architecture for organizations looking to migrate their GIS network into a secured cloud environment. Customers can even pair this offering with Cloudpoint’s managed services to have a complete, turn-key Enterprise GIS solution allowing them to focus on their end-user applications and workflows. With this approach, Cloudpoint will launch, deploy, and maintain your complete GIS server architecture in Amazon’s AWS cloud environment giving you as much or as little involvement as you prefer. Yes, that’s right, no need to worry about future server upgrades, monitoring logs, or up-time statistics. Isn’t it time to be done with ‘boxes in the back room’? Contact their professional services or call 877-377-8124 for a brief consultation to see if migrating to the cloud is right for you.

Staying Aligned with Esri at its Partner Conference in Palm Springs

Despite the recent COVID-19 setbacks, the Cloudpiont team was represented at the recent Esri Partner Conference in sunny Palm Springs, CA on March 7-9. Jon Hodel and Micah Williamson were able to attend the conference to stay abreast with the latest technology and solutions offered by Esri through all facets of the ArcGIS platform. It was a bit of an unusual conference given the circumstances surrounding the coronavirus concerns as we were surprised by things like the last-minute cancellation of the exhibits, solutions expo, and developer conference, as well as bumping elbows with people we greeted instead of the normal hand shake. Another unique sight was people scrubbing down their airplane seats with cleaning wipes before sitting down. And given the outlook of things it may be the last conference we are able to attend for several weeks.

All of that aside it was still a very productive and fruitful endeavor as we were able to connect with key personnel from Esri to discuss business strategies and meet new Esri partners that could prove to be valuable relationships in the future. Lots of chatter about ArcGIS Indoors, Machine Learning, Services Opportunities, Upgraded Partner Directory, and discussion about benefits of being a Release Ready partner. Jon was even asked to be on a Release Readiness panel with two other founder, CEO’s of GIS companies. We learned that we are 1 of only 77 Release Ready specialty partners. Our team has found tremendous benefit from attending the EPC and looks forward to continued ongoing alignment with the Esri team.

Cloudpoint’s Jon Hodel participates on a discussion panel sharing insights about what it means to be a Release Ready partner. Other participants were Skye Perry from SSP Innovations and Josh Northcott from Hounder.

Cloudpoint Showcasing its best at the 2020 Esri's Midwest User Conference

Its clear to see that after attending the 2020 Esri Midwest User Conference in Chicago, Esri knows how to put on a good show. Cloudpoint was pleased to be a part of this year’s program by being one of just seven sponsors. As expected, the event attracted GIS users, analysts, IT professionals, department managers, local and state officials from across the Midwest. The technical sessions were loaded with new content from Esri including talks about Enterprise Implementation Best Practices, Mobile & Field Collection tools like ArcGIS QuickCapture, Parcel Fabric in ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS, Public Works Solutions for Local Governments, and a slew of others.

If you were not one of the hundreds of attendees at this year’s event, you should definitely mark your calendar for next year. It appears that this one will continue to grow in attendance and continue to attract folks from many different states. As one of our booth visitors put it, “The food here is fantastic. Much better than my last conference where all I got was 2 free drink tickets”. Of course it helps that the historic Hilton hotel in Chicago has such a knack for delivering an amazing conference atmosphere. Here are some photos from Jon, Micah, Erin, and Bill, our four team members who attended the event…

If you missed out this year, contact us or call 877-377-8124 and we’ll make sure you receive a personal invite for next year.