Case Study
The Equiom team of Geographical Information System (GIS) and Imaging professionals
is responsible for production data management for Microsoft Bing Maps
The Problem
Microsoft Bing Maps receives terabytes of data that need to be processed and
migrated to the live production environment every day. Additionally, the team often
needs to supplement the production environment with locally generated data such
as 3-D imaging, street photos, mapping information, and other data. The work needed
to accomplish this task can be labor intensive and highly specialized.
Excellence with Equiom
From an initial (acquired) core team of GIS professionals, Equiom expanded the team
by 300% in order to meet the challenge of increasing capacity and quality of the
published data. In addition to meeting the technical challenge of migrating the
data processing pipeline from a legacy system, Equiom managed the organization growth
by maintaining the small startup culture that the initial team brought to the table.
Equiom offered a great plan to continue the production momentum without any outage
by transitioning the production team under the Equiom company structure. Now, the
production team is fully transitioned through this new "Equiom" vendor model and
all ongoing production work is processed by Equiom staff.
With an agile approach, Equiom built processes and team presence at Boulder, CO.
This was done in an on-demand fashion starting from Equiom having no presence in
Boulder, CO to a full team of GIS Professionals. As a result, Equiom is able to
pass on the cost savings directly to its client.
"All we can say is - great performance. This could have been a very disruptive process
for us. But Equiom created a solution by diligently setting up a local office while
transitioning the production team. They worked very closely with us to make it as
painless as possible with great communication and steady progress," stated
Michael Wright, Production Manager, Microsoft Bing Maps.
A great accomplishment for Equiom is that the Equiom data management team is responsible
for as much as 50 Terabytes of monthly updates on maps.live.com. This is equivalent
to updating half of the library of congress each month.
Continuing Production Success
Having an actual presence in Boulder, CO makes a huge difference in Equiom’s ability
to attract and retain GIS professionals. Our strategic location provides the ideal
location to grow the data management team for Microsoft Bing Maps.
"Equiom has done a great job recruiting excellent people and adapted quickly and
effectively have have helped us reach our production goals. Equiom is very responsive
- not only setting up an effective website – Equiom Central - but also adapting
it to our needs. They are great communicators, competitively priced and very responsive.
I would highly recommend working with Equiom."
Michael Wright
Production Manager
