New Year, New Opportunities

In 2011 Maptek celebrated 30 years in the mining industry. On behalf of everyone at Maptek I want to acknowledge the contributions of our customers and thank you for your continued support. Our local office parties reminded us all that we are part of a wider organisation with a proud history. We were able to share with many of you during the year at our users conferences in Western Australia, Scotland and Chile. We also established some new mining engineering scholarships and made donations to other mining schools to help mark our milestone.

As we enter 2012, Maptek is excited to meet the growing needs of the mining industry. Our global presence expanded during 2011 and we opened new offices in India, and Calgary, Canada, with PT Globecon being engaged as Vulcan agents in Jakarta and Kalimantan, Indonesia.

At the end of last year Maptek sat down with Vulcan users to get feedback on a range of issues. Number one on the list was the ability to manage larger datasets. This is no surprise – data volumes are growing exponentially across all industries. And the increased use of mine-operated tracking and sensing devices will accelerate the trend for unstructured data types such as video, text and media files. Added to this is the need to address issues like software interoperability, tagging, privacy and security of data. To meet this challenge, we will be introducing a version of Vulcan optimised for 64-bit operating systems, among other enhancements.

Another area that experienced unprecedented interest in 2011 is laser scanning. Our I-Site scanners are now essential mine survey equipment at many sites and that growth is poised to accelerate in 2012. At the end of the year two large coal entities in North America and Australia each ordered seven high performance I-Site 8800 systems for use across their sites. With the first I-Site 8400 medium range laser scanners off the production line in January, Maptek will be covering all angles for routine topographic survey and volumetric tasks.

In 2012, we expect that emerging trends and technologies like virtualisation, cloud-based services, enhanced business intelligence capabilities and social platforms will become focal points for our industry. Many of our customers are already working to leverage these technologies and Maptek is devoting significant resources towards researching and developing solutions that will enable our customers to realise their potential.

As we begin 2012 we obviously have a lot of work to do. Let’s make the most of it.