Resume - Peter Batty

Summary

Founder and President of Spatial Networking, a startup building a new infrastructure for calendaring and scheduling, combining social networking and future location.
Highly successful Chief Technology Officer, widely regarded as an industry leader in the field of geospatial technology
Served as Chief Technology Officer of Intergraph Corporation, the second largest geospatial software company with revenues of ~$600m, from 2005 to 2007
Was a founder and Chief Technology officer of Ten Sails (now Ubisense), a leader in precision indoor location tracking systems.
Played a major role in leading Smallworld Systems from a small startup to the global market leader in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for Utilities and Telecommunications, with revenues of $100m+ and over 800 employees in 18 countries. Smallworld is now part of GE Energy.
Member of the Editorial Advisory Board of GeoWorld, the industry's leading magazine, since 1996 - interviewed each year for the "Industry outlook" feature.
Written a quarterly column in GeoWorld magazine since 2004
Winner of a record eight speaker awards (based on attendee feedback) from GITA, the organizer of the industry's leading conference
Member of the Board of GITA, 2004-2007
Has spoken at many industry conferences around the world, and had many articles and papers published. Invited presentations include keynote presentations at the GSDI (Global Spatial data Infrastructure) conference in Chile in 2006; at GITA New Zealand in 2006; at GeoAlberta in Calgary in 2006; at GIS in the Rockies in 2003; at GeoBrasil 2002, the major GIS conference in South America; a panel at the Geo Asia Pacific 2000 conference in Bangkok attended by the Princess of Thailand and several senior ministers; the CIER electrical conference in Uruguay in 1999; and GITA conferences in Hungary and Australia in 2000
Presented at many user conferences, including a keynote at Intergraph 2006 in front of over 2000 people, speaking before General Colin Powell in the opening session. Was widely seen as the main voice of Smallworld by customers and the industry in general, especially in North America: always gave the main presentation at Smallworld user conferences on new announcements and product directions
Excellent ability to understand and solve complex technical problems, and to communicate complex technical issues to a general audience. Good knowledge of a broad range of information technology areas, including application development, database and Internet technologies, and good insight into future IT industry directions. Strong leadership and people skills.
Led the development of several pioneering major software systems, with a track record of delivering outstanding systems in a very short time. Invented some key innovations in the Smallworld product line. Worked on a wide range of GIS implementation projects.
Wrote many of the Smallworld technical papers, which played a significant role in differentiating Smallworld in the GIS marketplace
Involved in industry standards initiatives, including the Open GIS Consortium (OGC), and IEC TC57 Working Group 14, a utility industry standards group.
B.A. in Mathematics, First Class, Oxford University
M.Sc. in Computation, Oxford University (top of class)

Employment

2005-2007 Chief Technology Officer, Intergraph

Had overall responsibility for technology and product directions at Intergraph, a global leader in Spatial Information Management systems with revenues of around $600m. Intergraph was publicly traded on NASDAQ until November 2006, when it was acquired by private equity investors for $1.2bn. Lead the development of new technical strategies for Intergraph's Security, Government and Infrastructure division, during a time of rapid change in many of its markets. Drove efforts to improve interoperability and integration between previously disparate Intergraph product lines, improving product competitiveness and leading to improved development efficiency. Presented at many conferences and had a number of articles and interviews published.

2002-2005 Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Ten Sails

Co-founded Ten Sails with former colleagues from Smallworld, working on building businesses in the geospatial and location technology industry. Evaluate new technologies and companies in this space. Currently focusing on work with Ubisense in the area of Local Positioning Systems and "Smart Space". Have consulted with various utilities on location technology and with several software companies on business strategy. Worked as an expert witness / consultant on multiple software related lawsuits. Written a number of articles and presented at various conferences on location technology trends.

2000 - 2002 Vice President of Technology, Smallworldwide / GE Smallworld / GE Network Solutions

Member of the Smallworld Executive Management Team. Overall responsibility for technical strategy, working closely with development, sales and marketing. Significant involvement in sales to key accounts. Presented topics relating to Smallworld technology and strategy at conferences and seminars. Worked with global alliance partners such as Oracle on technical strategy. Managed the Utility Product Development Group, about 40 people working on two major product lines, for a 6 month period in 2001, which led to a significant improvement in on time delivery and quality. When GE Smallworld merged with GE Harris to form GE Network Solutions, was responsible for product integration strategy across the combined company.

1997 - 1999 Vice President, Technology & Development, Smallworld Systems Inc., USA

Member of the Smallworld Americas management team, with primary responsibilities being technical strategy and US based product development. Had significant involvement in overall Smallworld product strategy. Led the development of the Smallworld PowerOn product for electric outage management, the first major vertical application developed by Smallworld, which rapidly became the market leader.

1993 - 1997 Technical Director, Smallworld Systems Inc., USA

Was one of the first two employees who started Smallworld in the USA, initially with responsibility for all technical aspects of the company, both pre- and post- sales. Carried out the application development benchmarks which resulted in Smallworld's first sales in the USA at Public Service Company of Colorado and Entergy, two of Smallworld's largest ever orders at the time, and worked on the implementation of both those projects. Moved on to focus primarily on technical sales work, advanced consultancy, future product directions and technical liaison with external parties. From 1995 to 1997 represented Smallworld on the OpenGIS Technical Committee, and on the OpenGIS Editorial Board.

1992 - 1993 Senior Applications Consultant, Smallworld Systems Ltd., UK

Involved in all technical aspects of the company, including sales and marketing, consultancy, implementation, development and training. Was solely responsible for the initial implementation of what was at the time Smallworld's largest production system at Manweb, a large UK electric utility (see details below).

1986 - 1992 Technical Specialist in GIS, IBM (UK)

Involved in various roles including support, implementation, consultancy, sales, marketing, development and training. In 1989 represented IBM EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) on a three month task force in Kingston, NY, to produce IBM's strategic technical plan for GIS. Ran the European Early Field Test of the IBM geoManager product. Developed substantial performance improvements for the geoManager product, which stored spatial data in DB2, through enhanced spatial indexing and detailed DBMS tuning. Acted as a consultant to the United Nations Environment Program GRID (Global Resource Information Database) project in Geneva. Worked on the design of a system to handle the Colombian census with IBM Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. Was responsible for the IBM technical strategy for migration from the old GFIS product set to their new GIS product. Was the technical organizer of an IBM international executive conference on GIS in La Hulpe, Belgium. Contributed to the work of the Association for Geographic Information (AGI) working party on the use of SQL in GIS. Worked on the implementation of many GIS projects in the UK and around the world.

Major implementation and development projects

PowerOn, 1997-99

Led the development of the PowerOn product for electric outage management. Carried out an initial technical feasibility study with Niagara Mohawk before starting product development. Managed a team of six to ten developers, both internal and contract, for the initial product release - the team later grew to around 20. Heavily involved with product architecture and customer liaison. PowerOn 1.0 was released after just ten months of development in July 1998, with eight major electric utilities having signed contracts for the product. PowerOn had a remarkable impact on the outage management market, winning 41% of procurements in North America from 1998-2000, roughly twice that of the nearest competitor. The win rate was 68% of procurements where Smallworld bid.

Southern New England Telecom (SNET), 1996

Led the development of a comprehensive application for design of RF cable networks, the Broadband Engineering Design Tool (BEDT). This was delivered on schedule in two phases of three months each and far surpassed other applications in this area. The application included advanced automated design tools and comprehensive integrated engineering analysis, including interactive signal level calculation and validation, amplifier configuration management and calculation of plug-in components, and powering validation. It also integrated with other systems, including Bellcore's TMM (Technology Management Module), UI (Unit Inventory), and Construction applications. This was a key tool in SNET's aggressive build out of new cable networks.

Entergy, New Orleans, 1993-95

Was the technical architect for Entergy's corporate GIS project, one of the most ambitious in the industry. Worked on data modeling, application design and prototyping in various areas including data conversion for both landbase and facilities; network design integrated with work management; engineering analysis; and outage management. Designed various mechanisms for integrating the GIS with other systems, including an existing Oracle-based transformer asset management system, Synercom's Oracle-based WMIS work management system, and a mainframe-based CIS which provides input to the outage management system. Developed a mechanism that allowed 1300 users to access a transformer load study application written in Magik to be accessed via a PowerBuilder application on a Windows PC. Developed a new technique for robust replication of data between VMDS and Oracle, which is used for the asset management system integration. This concept was later implemented as the Smallworld InSync product, a key component of the Smallworld database strategy. Developed new code for handling multiple projections, from which key concepts were incorporated back into the core product.

Public Service Company of Colorado (PSCo), Denver, 1993-94

Was the technical architect for the project to migrate PSCo's 92 seat IBM GFIS system onto Smallworld in the very aggressive timescale of 15 months. Designed and wrote a translator to perform the complex task of converting their GFIS (IFF) data to Smallworld (which has been reused at many other sites around the world), designed the mechanism for integrating with existing systems using DB2 and IMS, via Sybase and CICS, and implemented one of the first Smallworld distributed database (persistent cache) sites. Developed a prototype trouble call analysis system.

Manweb (Merseyside and North Wales Electricity Board), UK, 1992-93

Was the sole designer, developer and project manager for a 35 seat data conversion center, which was at the time Smallworld's largest production system, and which proved to be one of the most successful conversion projects the industry has seen. Developed several new techniques for data conversion, including major user interface improvements and the use of software to manage the whole conversion and quality assurance process, which has been re-used in many other sites. The initial system was in production with 70 users after just ten weeks of development. After the initial implementation, managed a team of three people working on subsequent phases of the project. Manweb successfully completed the conversion of all their records (30,000 detailed maps representing a network serving 1.3 million customers) on target in just over two years.

Technical Skills

Programming languages

Experience with C# and Visual Studio, Python, HTML, Smallworld Magik (an OO language similar to Smalltalk), IBM GPG, Visual Basic, C, FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal, REXX, LISP, Orwell, KRC, ML, Basic, Z-80 Assembler, Prolog, Forth, Occam, Z formal specification language. Familiarity with Smalltalk, Java, JavaScript, C++, System/370 assembler.

Operating systems

UNIX (HP-UX, SunOS and Solaris, IBM AIX, Dec Ultrix and OSF/1), DOS, Windows 3.1/95/98/NT/2000/XP, VM, MVS, VMS.

Database management systems

Oracle, Sybase, DB2, SQL/DS, Smallworld VMDS, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access.

Education

1982 - 1985 B.A. in Mathematics (First Class), Balliol College, Oxford University
1985 - 1986 M.Sc. in Computing (came top in exams), Balliol College, Oxford University. Dissertation on "The implementation of Z specifications in Orwell", a study involving formal specifications and functional programming.

Prizes and scholarships

1983: Fletcher scholarship from Balliol College, Oxford
1985: Coolidge Pathfinder travel scholarship from Balliol College - travel scholarship to spend the summer in the USA, awarded to six students each year for outstanding contribution to the College.
1986: Oxford University Programming Research Group Award for performance in exams (finished top in my year). "
1987 and 1989: IBM Outstanding Contribution Awards.
1990: IBM technical paper award for one of the top six technical publications of the year.
1993: AGI award for writing one of the top papers at the Birmingham conference.
1995, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004: GITA (formerly AM/FM) speaker award for presenting one of the top 5% of papers at the annual conference, based on attendee feedback (Nobody else has won this award six times).
2000, 2004: GITA Australia / New Zealand speaker award, for being the best speaker at the Australian GITA conference.

Conference Presentations

Presented at many conferences around the world, including the following:

GITA 2007 Conference, San Antonio: The Disruption of Geospatial technology (part of a seminar on "Mapping Applications on the Web: Evolution or Revolution?"); What's New and Cool, and Where are we Going? (paper presentation); Extending the Reach of Geospatial Technology (panel discussion)
GITA Pacific Northwest annual conference, 2006, Salishan, Oregon: invited keynote presentation on technology trends in the geospatial industry
GSDI (Global Spatial Data Infrastructure) conference 9, Santiago, Chile, 2006: invited keynote speaker on the role of geospatial technology and standards in reducing poverty and enabling sustainable development
GeoAlberta 2006 Conference, Edmonton: invited keynote speaker on geospatial technology trends
Homeland Defense Journal workshop, May 2006, "Achieving Actionable Situation Awareness; Geo-Spatial Solutions — The Next Generation": Technology to Support a Common Operating Picture (video interview)
GITA New Zealand 2006 Conference, Wellington: invited keynote speaker on geospatial technology trends
GITA Australia & New Zealand Conference, 2004, Melbourne: Spatial Visionaries Session
GITA 2004 Conference, Seattle: Technology Trends in the Spatial Industry
GIS in the Rockies, 2003: invited keynote speaker on Geospatial Integration
Cook-Hurlbert New Technology Summit, September 2003: invited opening speaker
GITA 2003: moderated a panel on "What's next: the way forward"
GEOBrasil Conference 2002: Geospatial Technology Trends (Keynote Address).
GITA 2002 Conference, Tampa: Version Management Revisited.
GITA 2001 Conference, San Diego: Principles of object-orientation (seminar).
GIS Asia Pacific Conference, 2000: Panel on industry directions, attended by the Princess of Thailand and several senior government ministers.
Geospatial 101: Fundamentals of GIT - inaugural GITA webcast, June 2000
GITA 2000 Conference, Denver: Technologies for Uniting the Enterprise; Principles of object-orientation (seminar). Also presented this paper at GITA Hungary 2000 in Budapest and GITA Australia / New Zealand 2000 in Sydney.
Distributech 2000, Miami: The trend towards integration of GIS and operational systems.
CIER conference, Punta Del Este, Uruguay, 1999: Breakthrough Improvements in Distribution Operations - leveraging the GIS investment
Driven by Data conference, Los Angeles, 1999: Closing Panel.
GITA California/Nevada, Oakland, 1999: The future of GIS in utilities
GITA Rocky Mountains, Denver, 1998: Keynote address.
AM/FM (GITA) 98 Conference, San Jose: Beyond GIS: A new level of integration. Also presented this paper at AM/FM Australia New Zealand 98, Melbourne.
AM/FM Australia/New Zealand 1997, Sydney, Australia: The impact of new technologies on AM/FM/GIS and AM/FM data modeling for utilities.
AM/FM 97 Conference, Nashville: Is mainstream database technology ready for GIS?; Object-Oriented Technologies and AM/FM/GIS (seminar)
AM/FM 96 Conference, Seattle: The impact of new technologies on AM/FM/GIS; Databases in GIS (panel); GIS and distributed processing (panel); Object-oriented programming (seminar).
DA/DSM 96 Conference, Tampa: Information models for distribution systems.
AGI 95 Conference, Birmingham, England: The Future of GIS (panel).
AM/FM 95 Conference, Baltimore: AM/FM data modeling for utilities
GIS 95 Conference, Vancouver: Experiences with object-orientation in GIS.
EGIS 94 Conference, Paris, France (with Gillian Kendrick): Use of an Integrated CASE Tool for GIS.
AM/FM 94 Conference, Denver, and AGI 93 conference, Birmingham, England (with Dick Newell): GIS databases are different
GIS 93 conference, Birmingham, England: Object-orientation: some objectivity please!
British Computer Society seminar, Warwick, England, 1993: Issues in corporate integration of GIS. " AGI 92 conference, Birmingham, England: An introduction to GIS database issues.
AM/FM European Conference, 1991, Montreux, Switzerland: GIS databases: a distributed future.
International GIS Sourcebook, 1991: Why use a standard RDBMS for GIS? (Referenced in the Oracle Multi-Dimension announcement literature in 1995).
IBM GFIS User Group, Mesa, Arizona, 1991: How to do geoManager retrievals in 5 seconds!
British Computer Society seminar, London, England, 1990, also published in Mapping Awareness magazine and Computers and GeoSciences: Exploiting relational database technology in GIS.

Articles

Written many articles on topics in the field of geospatial and location technologies. Click for a detailed list.