GCS Joins Hands with Global Touchpoints

GCS (News - Alert), a geoanalytics company, has joined hands with Global Touchpoints Inc., an expertise-based IT solutions company, to develop Big Data solutions combining business intelligence and geospatial analytics for state and local government agencies.

As part of the pact, GCS and Global Touchpoints will be targeting specifically government offices with Big Data challenges related to healthcare, energy/utilities, and water resource management.

“Global Touchpoints has a proven track record of extracting meaningful business intelligence from Big Data to give their clients an edge on the competition,” said Rob Kinnear, GCS director of strategic partnerships, in a statement.

Kinnear said that GCS will build real-time geoanalytics into their solutions to add a geospatial context to the derived information.

“The domain knowledge and subject matter expertise that GCS carries in the field of geospatial data, and the technology based services and solutions of Touchpoints are very complementary to cross position and service each other’s clients,” said Giordan Pogioli, director of Big Data and analytics at Global Touchpoints of Roseville, Calif.

“When it comes to helping the government catch up to the commercial sector with their information management, you would be hard pressed to find a team of technology and business domain experts out there that are more qualified to deploy these revolutionary systems than the combined capabilities of our two firms,” said Pogioli.

Rob Kinnear said that the company’s geospatial solutions complement Global Touchpoints’ sensor-based systems to provide a location component and real-time analysis of the Big Data as it streams in from the sensors.

“Whether the data relates to public health, natural resource or energy consumption, geoanalytics allows the extracted business intelligence to be visualized in a geographic perspective – vital information for any government agency,” said Kinnear.

Earlier this month, GCS had announced that it has hired Rob Kinnear as director of strategic partnerships.

Among Kinnear’s primary responsibilities will be the development of new markets for custom Big Data solutions built on top of the IBM (News - Alert) Watson cognitive computing technology.

The IBM Watson Ecosystem is a cognitive engine that combines natural language processing, machine learning, and hypothesis generation and evaluation to deliver confidence-based responses. Watson can tap into an encyclopedic database of information and then apply reasoning based on its previous experiences to answer complex questions posed to it.