Jason Setzer
Cloud Product Manager
Blackbridge
Germany

Biography
Jason Setzer is the Cloud Product Manager at BlackBridge AG in Berlin. He owns the GeoCloud product suite, bringing the vast RapidEye satellite archive directly to users through cloud computing approaches. He is a 16 year veteran in the geo-spatial and remote sensing industries. Notably, Jason worked at Microsoft for over 7 years as a manager on several large Bing Maps programs. He also holds a master’s degree in GIS from Penn State University. In his spare time he enjoys playing guitar, brewing ale, and other analog pursuits.

Abstract
Satellite Imagery On Demand through Cloud Computing

BlackBridge uses its GeoCloud Suite to enhance access to its satellite imagery products. Since 2009 the Rapid Eye satellite constellation has been operational, collecting upwards of 6 billion square kilometers of imagery around the globe. The GeoCloud Suite is a cloud based virtual compute service hosted inside BlackBridge’s custom-built data center in Alberta, Canada. With ongoing growth of the RapidEye imagery archive, inclusion of 3rd party imagery, and a new generation of RapidEye satellites coming, traditional data access methods don’t scale to serve the vast quantities of imagery available. After 6 years, the RapidEye archive has reached critical mass for being a viable repository of historic EO data, along with its daily revisit capability. The ability for BlackBridge to offer consistent RE products everywhere has increased demand in both new and old data. Rather than single image transactions, customers can subscribe to specific areas and times of interest, then access all this imagery for a reasonable price. Constraints shift away from data availability and high cost, and become a challenge of consumption. With access to data over a given country from the last several years, how realistic is it to maintain multiple local copies? Assuming that organizations even have the IT infrastructure in place to store and host this data to begin with, in many cases it is only necessary or logical to access specific scenes on an as needed basis. Internal hosting challenges can also be overcome through the GeoCloud because dispersed users can access subscribed imagery from any location. The ability for users to access products in a real time, web-based, self-serve portal is a welcome advance from FTP and hard disk deliveries. Additionally, BlackBridge offers a catalog search API for programmatic discovery and download, which are useful to pull images directly into customer systems and work flows. Beyond this, BlackBridge is developing streaming services for WMS and WCS access out of its Canadian data center. It will be publishing new APIs for customers to monitor order status, and will have completed a prototype system that uses OGC web processing services (WPS) for creating derivative products on the fly in the GeoCloud.