Introduced as “one of our more unusual sessions”. Session abstract:
“State government a hotbed of technology innovation – huh? But that’s exactly right. The Ohio Dept of Transportation has harnessed extensive infrastructure (thousands of sensors, historical & police data, etc.) and cloud services to create a rich solution. Through a series of demos, this session will showcase for delegates how the Buckeye State has created a rich user experiences for residents, visitors and internal staff conducting detailed traffic analysis. In doing so, we will see how the IT team looked beyond just using cloud services, to combining with what’s on premise, and then becoming a supplier of these services to others. We will also share follow-up resources that attendees can review for further reference and follow-up, including access to code libraries, code snippets from the discussion. Join the two presenters and see for yourself the combination of on-premise & services in action.”
Session speakers are Brian H. Prince, an Architect Evangelist with Microsoft and Steve Milroy,a solution architect with OnTerra Systems. The ODOT architect is home in Ohio, economy & travel restrictions. Sound familiar?
The session is doing a demo of buckeye traffic, a publicly available site. I just went out to check out road closures. The data for the road conditions – icy, wet – are provided by sensors in the road. There’s also webcam integration and a bunch of interesting data. The public layers are only part of the solution, there’s functionality for ODOT, first responders and more.
Now, the cloud part. The mapping application is Virtual Earth. Upon a filter click request, the ODOT central repositories are accessed. These repositories and corresponding web services are on-premise. The traffic and weather sensors feed a variety of applications for ODOT. There is also robotic and manual data collection.
There is a strong customer community. Demand for the application varies by external events, such as weather conditions. This is one reason why ODOT moved from an on-premise mapping solution to Virtual Earth.
Picking on-premise vs. cloud
- only write the code that only you can write!
- harness investments in on-premises infrastructure – can’t just throw out what you have in place
- development cost and time – ODOT reduced both cost & time
- infrastructure costs – during spikes (floodgate events), ODOT is no longer serving mapping images out, just responding to data request; scale is now off-premise
- bandwidth usage
Going Forward
- Increase enterprise innovation – this project kick started ODOT’s innovation process/projects
- Make IT part of the Conversation – IT moved to adult table
This solution is used by citizens, agencies and vendors. Both the mapping application and the underlying data.
“The magic behind SOA that cloud makes it easier to execute is that I can now share information and applications with anyone that is interested.” –Brian Prince
In closing, advise to consider moving applications that are “core but not strategic” to the cloud.
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