INCATech: Delivering Breakthrough Results in Business and Mission Performance

Our staff have lived this transformation as hands-on practitioners, guiding organizations through migration to web-based geospatial workloads, and co-creating new and more efficient workflows. What sets us apart from other firms is our extensive experience integrating the full Esri platform and applications with third-party systems and tools. INCATech is an Esri small-business partner, helping to refine the containerization of services through Kubernetes within ArcGIS Enterprise. Ultimately, our work will improve the scalability, stability, and velocity in which organizations can deploy geospatial workloads to the cloud. For high-side customers, Esri themselves have trusted INCATech to support the development of infrastructure-as-code for their own products, deliver cookbooks for automated ArcGIS Enterprise configuration in low-to-high classification domains, and securely propagate new capabilities. Our close partnership with Esri is allowing us to continue developing innovative solutions to help our customers keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies.

What kind of challenges do your clients encounter, and how does INCATech address the challenges?

Jesse Osborne: One of the prominent challenges we often face is to construct solutions that provide the protection of private information while preserving the appropriate levels of access. Working with Esri technology for many years has allowed us to understand various proven patterns of architecting optimal solutions to meet the Federal IT, security, and different organizational governance policies and standards. This is an ongoing issue to contend with because as customers are finding it easier and easier to use ArcGIS in their workflows, it also makes it easier for those customers to misstep and mismanage privileged information without the right constraints and governance policies built into the system. INCATech’s approach is to become intimately familiar with our customer’s missions, and then we create the right-sized technical solution that robustly manages the full data lifecycle while also mitigating risk and vulnerabilities. As a result, customers lean on INCATech to leverage the expertise from both the analytical and engineering sides of the house for making things easy, focused, and user-centric.

Considering that spatial awareness has become ubiquitous, customers are increasingly expecting the spatial aspects of data to be presented in a human digestible form like ArcGISStoryMaps and interactive dashboards with different visualizations and graphical layers. INCATech creates dynamic products to meet these needs, allowing customers to fuse data from various sources, know what trends are forming and what’s happening right now, and make data-informed decisions. INCATech’s solutions are increasingly becoming a crucial resource to help customers stay competitive, perform on mission, and deliver value to their stakeholders.

Can you please elaborate on a customer success story?

Jesse Osborne: A great use-case would be INCATech’s support of the Department of State (DoS), Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA), who requires developing and maintaining Travel.State.Gov (TSG). TSG receives web traffic of over 800 million unique visitors per year and provides the general public with critical information about the current state of geopolitical relationships with the other Nation States, the safety of the U.S. general public traveling abroad, and online services for managing passports/visas. INCATech found that the existing process for editing data on TSG’s Travel Advisory maps could be enhanced; it required a GIS specialist to perform a workflow of complex operations using specialized desktop software, which took hours at a time. Within just two months, INCATech redesigned the process and rapidly developed a self-service web application for CA personnel. The solution automates the deployment of data edits to the public in a matter of minutes. INCATech also designed this web application to be so user-friendly that any authorized user can utilize it, regardless of skill level.

Taking a closer look at the near future, what plans do you have in terms of expansion or offerings?

Bruce Freedman: To build upon our established experience and expertise with the WebGIS ecosystem, we are pursuing the Cloud Specialty Designation with Esri. This will strengthen our resume with recognition for the skills we are already demonstrating in current projects. Concurrently, we are growing our INCATech Cloud and Platform Services practice by building cross-functional teams, including cloud-native engineers, DevOps experts, and IT professionals that have in-depth geospatial developer and engineering expertise. We are currently participating in Beta Testing groups with Esri, such as the Kubernetes (K8) and TensorFlow Lite for Survey123, and testing development and delivery in support of Federal customers, non-profits, States and Locals, and the commercial market. We’re expanding our User CenteredDesign practice to account for human behaviors, logical information architecture, usability, and clear and compelling visualization. By leveraging design principles in our iterative Agile development processes, we focus on end-users and their needs while optimizing workflows and how they use and experience our geospatial applications.