- SWOT analysis is a strategic planning method for evaluating a new business opportunity.
- The software is not keeping pace with hardware advances, particularly in the terrestrial scanning market.
- A SWOT analysis of the vendors provides insight into the problem.
As part of building the opportunity proposal for a new product many software companies will perform what is called a SWOT analysis. Wikepdia defines SWOT Analysis as a strategic planning method used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business venture.
Over the past few months I have heard from a number of conference attendees that the 3D laser scanning software industry is not keeping pace with the advances in hardware. I think this is particularly true for applications that are trying to feed 3D data into existing, CAD-based design engines. In the aerial segment LIDAR Analyst and LP360 are addressing the need for providing LiDAR data to ArcGIS users. In the short range market Rapidform, Polyworks, and Geomagic are providing customers with functionality that is pushing the envelope in these application areas, and in some cases into the long range.
So my question is, “Why is there not more innovation taking place in the terrestrial 3D laser scanning software market?”
I think the primary answer comes from a SWOT analysis. I believe most hardware vendors’ strength is in building scanners. In the early days they were forced into the software business. Today they have all they can do to keep up with the firmware upgrades, and the threat of their competitors leapfrogging them in terms of performance.
On the software vendor side their weakness is the lack of in-house expertise as it applies to integrating point clouds into CAD-based, design environments, and even if they did the legacy code that they are dealing with makes this a very difficult problem to solve. Of course the other issue is the proprietary nature of the data formats.
Seems like this creates opportunity, but so far the threats/risks have been too high.
I like your analysis of this.
“I think the primary answer comes from a SWOT analysis. I believe most hardware vendors’ strength is in building scanners. In the early days they were forced into the software business. Today they have all they can do to keep up with the firmware upgrades, and the threat of their competitors leapfrogging them in terms of performance.”
This is accurate and reflects a techno-centric approach. I agree with you that opportunities are being missed.
When we began our magazine we deliberately set about to discuss proces and show the value of some of these technologies. Needless to say, pulling techno-centric folks into the discussion has been eye opening to me – and telltale.
Where are the people who can answer questions like, “how will lidar contribute toward my governments environmental policies – and how?” Or, “which lidar people are talking about their technology in terms of sustainable approaches?” “How does lidar connect to 3D cities?” All of these are important to reaching the opportunities.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks Jeff. I guess we are still in the early adopter stage, but I think the industry may be missing the opportunity to talk about benefits, not features. The customer does not have much of a voice right now.
Gene
Interesting point. We saw the same thing on the aerial side back in the early days of adoption (c. 1995 – 2000). However, CAD-based engineering workflows using airborne lidar in topographic mapping or as part of an orthophoto product are pretty mature these days using tools such as Terrasolid’s TerraScan (add-on for MicroStation). This happened when the hardware manufacturer’s got out of the software business and opened-up their data formats by adopting the .LAS standard. I expect the same will happen on the mobile side eventually. Unfortunately one of the barriers to attracting more third-party software developers is the users themselves. It still amazes me how, after dropping significant capital on the hardware, an organization won’t invest in additional software tools (often costing less than 1/10 the cost of the hardware) to help them get a quality product out the door. There tends to be a sensor-centric view to the business, perhaps inadvertently encouraged by the hardware vendors, that is not productive in the long run.
Thanks for the feedback Martin. I could not agree with you more. There really is a lot of opportunity to move from the present model to one that is more customer benefit centric.