Zag sets up Spatial Services team dedicated to GIS

The new Spatial Services team will be headed by Matti Seikkula who joins Zag with 30 years of experience of IT and GIS.

SAP and cloud solution provider Zag (previously Soltius) has set up a Spatial Services team dedicated to Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The new Spatial Services team will be headed by Matti Seikkula who joins Zag with 30 years of experience of IT and GIS.

With many businesses and councils using GIS systems to display and analyze data geographically, such as property records and utility locations, the integration of GIS systems with SAP has been a steadily growing market for Zag.

The technology is finding applications in areas such as supply chain management, the insurance industry and even retail where it is proving useful in areas like outlet planning and forecasting. Spatial data promises to bring new insights to businesses as diverse as banking, farming, urban planning, and healthcare. Many existing customers already have their GIS systems linked to SAP and setting up a dedicated division to service and expand this market was a logical move for the company, says CEO Nick Mulcahy.

“Many of our customers have been talking to us about providing support for their Spatial integrations and the growth in these requests has pushed us to set up Spatial Services to give customers a one-stop-shop for SAP and Spatial. As a result, we’ve created New Zealand’s first dedicated SAP and GIS business unit.”

“We’re thrilled to have Matti come on board to head up the Spatial team. He brings decades of experience to the business and is well known throughout the industry as a Geo-Spatial expert.”

Matti Seikkula comes to Zag from leading spatial services provider e-Spatial where he was the CIO & Principal Consultant. He was named Professional of the Year in the 2015 NZ Spatial Excellence awards for his contribution to the Spatial industry over the previous 19 years and is a regular speaker on all things Geospatial at various industry conferences across Australasia.

Seikkula points out that Spatial is now mainstream; it has matured into the cloud, is getting frequent requests to be integrated with enterprise systems and can incorporate freely available and complementary open reference data. With dominant GIS provider ESRI announcing last year its enterprise systems will run on SAP’s HANA database, the time is right for a team dedicated to supporting customers through what can be complex implementations of SAP and Spatial systems.“Most organizations still find the spatial industry overly complicated – this is where Zag’s Spatial team will help; simplifying these interfaces and helping teams across Business, IT and GIS work better together.”

“With businesses and government increasingly making use of big-data analytics to aid their decision making, integrating and maximizing the benefit from GIS systems will grow in importance. Zag has already involved in this space thanks to supporting existing customers, but the creation of Spatial Services will allow us to work within the business and with customers to find innovative ways to integrate Zag’s existing offerings with our new Spatial offerings.”