🔒PenBay Solutions develops a GIS tool for mapping what’s inside buildings

Since 2006, New York City has required owners of office towers taller than 15 stories to file “emergency action plans.” Tens of thousands of floor plans have since been delivered to the city's fire department, which reviews them every six months to make sure they've properly identified evacuation routes and sheltering locations within the building if escape is not possible.

Obviously, that's a labor-intensive task — especially so since the floor plans run the gamut from simple hand-drawn documents to traditional blueprints to computer-assisted drawings to sophisticated 3-D renderings capable of showing details down to every door latch.

But daunting problems create business opportunities. FDNY's need for a simple, effective way of making sense of all those disparate floor plans proved to be a tailor-made opportunity for a three-year-old Topsham company, PenBay Solutions LLC, to demonstrate how its Geographic Information Systems software could help New York City attain its post-9/11 safety and security goals.

What PenBay Solutions did, says CEO Bill Barron, is create a workflow and data-conversion process to translate all those floor plans into digital information that became an easily retrievable GIS database for FDNY's management of emergency planning in New York City. With PenBay Solutions' help, he says, New York City now has the largest GIS repository of building floor plans in the world. That success, in turn, led to another high-stakes, quick-turnaround job — a GIS map showing dozens of venues and hundreds of scheduled events within New York City for Super Bowl XLVIII that was used by FDNY to coordinate safety and security with dozens of local, state and federal agencies in the weeklong celebrations prior to the Feb. 2 game between the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks.

“Getting fire departments to take that leap of faith is huge,” Barron says of FDNY's embrace of the GIS technology his company is using in new ways to streamline facilities management mapping and public safety and security planning. “So we're over that hump. Now we are in the classic flexion point of the growth curve.”

The possibilities are endless, Barron says, with several universities, the Los Angeles public school system and the Veterans Administration joining FDNY as early users of PenBay Solutions' InVision suite of GIS software.

The 'Aha! moment'

Barron credits his brother-in-law, Stuart Rich, PenBay Solutions' chief technology officer, with identifying facilities management — i.e., the geography inside buildings — as a vast untapped market for GIS solutions. “Stu, god bless his soul, realized all the rules, all the technology that GIS is based on, there's no reason you couldn't extend it under the roof. Whether it's a state border, a county boundary line or the footprint of a building, what's the difference?” 

At the time, Rich was working for Rockland-based PenBay Media, a separately owned Rockland company with a different business plan and clientele.

The first inkling that the 40-plus-year-old GIS technology also could be applied inside buildings, Rich says, came about 10 years ago in Hampton, Va., during a comprehensive analysis to determine the Langley Air Force Base's ability to absorb additional Air Force units relocating there due to base closures elsewhere. “We're going to have to go through a big building boom,” he remembers being told by an Air Force official. “Can you help us build a system that helps us see the utilization rate of our existing buildings?”

“Being young and naïve, I said, 'Certainly,'” Rich recalls. “What I didn't understand at the time: There was no consumer software model for GIS inside a building. What was incredibly obvious to me was that the space management question at the Air Force base was fundamentally a GIS problem … not only at Langley but at all of the Air Force bases impacted by the base closures and realignments at that time. Bringing in a GIS toolset and approach to that problem was my 'aha! moment.'”

Rich says traditional GIS mapping tools need a “bridge” to get past “the inconvenient roof” in order to get at the next level of geographic information — namely, a detailed layout and inventory of everything inside the footprint of one or more buildings. Talking it over with his brother-in-law, a financial analyst with a 24-year career in banking, they soon realized they'd need to create their own software to bridge the gap between GIS mapping systems and computer-aided design and building information modeling systems commonly used to map the inside of buildings.

“There was a sense of urgency and continues to be a sense of urgency,” Rich says, in large part because he and Barron didn't want someone else to figure out how to solve that problem before them.

Partnering with Esri

Barron says it took five years to develop the software and analyze the best markets to pursue before he and Rich were ready to launch their company.

From the start, they knew they should partner with the world's leading GIS software company, Redlands, Calif.-based Esri, which was co-founded in 1969 by Jack Dangermond and his wife Laura and has grown into a $913 million company with 9,000 employees worldwide. Esri makes a versatile GIS software platform, known as ArcGIS, which its paid users can combine with their own data and that of others to create maps or datasets. Importantly, Esri allows companies like PenBay Solutions to create software that enables ArcGIS users to solve unique problems — a business strategy that obviously proved to be immensely successful for Esri, whose software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide.

But Esri is selective in letting other software companies build upon its ArcGIS platform. It vets prospective partners to make sure they have a solid business strategy and the technical capability to pull it off. It took persistence, but eventually Barron and Rich gained Esri's blessing to build its own software suite upon the ArcGIS platform.

“We got an audience with Jack,” Barron says. “We told him our story. He said, 'Wow, that's a big market. Go for it.”

Building its clientele

Barron, who focuses on strategy, finance and business development, says PenBay Solutions' present challenge is selecting which business sectors will drive the development of its InVision suite of software. Since the GIS technology is so versatile — and now that the barrier of the “inconvenient roof” has been removed — he acknowledges that's more difficult than it sounds.

“My partner calls it, 'being a dog in a meat market,'” he says. “It's hard to pick which market to focus our efforts on.”

A common denominator of PenBay Solutions' current clients — which include the Los Angeles school system, colleges developing campus master plans, public safety organizations and national, state and local governments — is that they all have multiple buildings and locations to manage. More often than not, he adds, they've helped PenBay map its own future.

“We're not a technology company, we solve business problems,” Barron says. “The most valuable people we have are our own clients. Every single one of our clients is moving left and right, moving from one job to another. Our clients are fantastic, they're constantly feeding us information that's helping us realize where we need to go as a company. A client might say, 'We need a mobile app with a campus map for our students.' Our answer is, 'You've got it.' The clients are pulling us along. It's perfect.”

“The beauty of GIS is that once the database has been created, it can be constantly updated as changes take place,” he adds. “The heavy lifting is getting the data and finding the data.”

This summer the company launched a new version of InVision that includes a set of applications designed for a mobile phone or tablet with a touch screen as the interface. The advantage, Rich says, is that mobile devices are particularly well suited for users to input data wherever they happen to be and have that information become available to other users with security clearances to access the central database.

Most of the company's capital in the last year was spent developing mobile apps for its InVision software, adds Barron.

In three years, Barron says, PenBay Solutions has become a company of 26 employees, with 60% in Maine and 40% outs of state. Although he declines to give the company's revenues, he says software sales increased dramatically this year over last.

“If we're not substantially bigger in five years, we're doing something wrong,” he says. “This is a much, much bigger opportunity than I ever thought it would be. The challenge of GIS is that you can do anything with it. So you've got to stay focused.”

“This is a new and burgeoning market,” agrees John Burns, managing partner of the Maine Venture Fund, an investor in PenBay Solutions. “The ability to be able to map your space and understand how everything relates, and do that in a virtual way via your computer, can save organizations huge amounts of money.”

Burns says PenBay Solutions offers a perfect example of how an “intellectual” or “creative” economy can help Maine in its transition from purely resource-based industries such as paper-making and offshore fishing.

“They work here in Maine, because they can,” he says. “The quality of place that we have here in Maine is important to them. These are really exciting developments for Maine's economy.”

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