Our Work

Blue Raster helps you tell your story through interactive
mapping technology. Make your message clear, exciting,
and user-friendly for both mobile and web platforms.

State & Local

Blue Raster Pioneering Imagery Management Technology and Delivery Workflows with ArcGIS

Many organizations prioritize the accessibility of imagery and image-derived products for visualization and analysis among both internal and external users. As such, efficient  management and delivery workflows are crucial for these organizations to fully harness the power of spatial data and maximize their product impact. Use cases for aerial images and raster data include land cover classification, urban planning, natural resource management, emergency response and disaster management, precision agriculture and conservation, environmental monitoring and change detection/climate change analysis.

Blue Raster specializes in utilizing the robust capabilities of GIS and cloud services to facilitate the seamless assembly, analysis, management and dissemination of multiresolution imagery, and raster data from different sources and timeframes. Our expertise helps organizations enhance their spatial data management and analysis capabilities.

Employing ArcGIS for Imagery Hosting, Analysis & Management

Empowered by cutting-edge technology, Blue Raster excels in tapping into the full potential of ArcGIS for image hosting, analysis, and delivery workflows across ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Pro, and ArcGIS Online. With ArcGIS Image Server and ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online, we enable organizations to host and conduct dynamic imagery analysis on an unprecedented scale.

The scalability and performance of ArcGIS Image Server redefines the boundaries of what is achievable in geospatial analytics. Additionally, by integrating imagery into the ArcGIS Online platform, organizations can create compelling and informative maps that facilitate a deeper understanding of their spatial data.

Providing On-Demand Imagery Delivery Services

We specialize in providing swift, on-demand collection and smooth delivery of imagery through versatile means including API keys, custom widgets, online user interfaces, and application plugins. Our expertise ensures that you have the necessary tools and support to cater to diverse requirements and preferences.

Whether you need quick access to specific imagery, or a tailored solution embedded within your applications, Blue Raster stands ready to assist, offering a range of flexible and efficient options to meet your unique needs.

Furthermore, we recognize the importance of seamless delivery workflows in ensuring timely access to critical imagery resources. Our solutions are designed to optimize delivery pipelines, minimizing latency and maximizing efficiency. Whether it's delivering imagery to remote field teams or integrating seamlessly with existing systems, we prioritize speed, reliability, and scalability to meet the dynamic needs of our clients.

Our commitment to innovation extends beyond just technology; it's ingrained in our culture. We're constantly exploring new ways to push the boundaries of what's possible, whether it's through advancements in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, or data visualization. By staying at the forefront of technological innovation, we empower our clients to stay ahead of the curve and achieve their objectives with confidence. Our teams of professionals are here to assist you in developing and deploying your delivery workflows.

Pioneering Collaborative Cloud-Based Imagery Management

For over a decade, Blue Raster has been working with clients and partners to deliver large volumes of imagery to support various geospatial workflows. Our cloud specialty has opened new frontiers for collaborative  management. Maximizing the cloud's scalability, organizations can now store, share, and analyze vast amounts of data in real-time. This not only streamlines internal processes but also facilitates effortless collaboration with external stakeholders.

Across the globe, our clients and partners are employing our services to manage and deliver their imagery to support their projects and organizational goals. Here are some examples:

Learn more about our work here

Contact Us

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

 

ArcGIS Monitor Maintains Healthy ArcGIS Enterprise for Collin County, TX

Blue Raster worked to deploy a well-architected ArcGIS Enterprise installation to support the growing GIS user base of Collin County, Texas. Just north of the Dallas – Fort Worth metropolitan area, Collin County has a rapidly growing population of over 1 million residents. With such a large and growing GIS practice to manage, the county looked to Blue Raster to install ArcGIS Monitor to aid in monitoring its GIS infrastructure and ensure that it stays up and running.

What is ArcGIS Monitor?

ArcGIS Monitor is a powerful tool from Esri that allows organizations to monitor the health of GIS infrastructure in real-time. It can help organizations identify and fix issues before they become major problems, saving time and money in the long run. This tool excels in:

  • Real-time monitoring of environments
  • Alerting and notifications for issues
  • Collection and analysis of performance data
  • Detailed resource utilization reporting
  • Monitoring of security events
  • Visualization of data in dashboards and reports

ArcGIS Monitor displaying performance metrics for Collin County's ArcGIS Enterprise

ArcGIS Monitor Provides Real-Time Performance Metrics for ArcGIS Enterprise

ArcGIS Monitor Helps Identify and Resolve Issues 

Blue Raster worked with Collin County to deploy a robust, well-architected installation of ArcGIS Enterprise 10.9.1 on-premises in 2022 and later added ArcGIS Monitor to maintain a healthy and stable environment. With Monitor, improved insights were apparent quickly with better visibility and quantification for issues related to Collin County's enterprise GIS. The tool saves time for GIS Supervisor Bret Fenster, providing a single location to monitor all components of ArcGIS Enterprise and make quick decisions based on real-time metrics.

"With ArcGIS Monitor, we’re able to assess the performance of our services and multi-server environment easily. Before we had Monitor, we had to RDP into each server to see exactly what was going on. Now, we can see CPU and RAM performance with one login and a well-crafted dashboard configured by our consultant, Blue Raster. "

- Bret Fenster, GIS Supervisor, Collin County

With improved visibility and insights into their ArcGIS Enterprise, Bret and his team were able to immediately address patterns they noticed with server performance and allocate more resources to the problem. The deeper level of metrics provided by ArcGIS Monitor helped Bret and team to address data and content governance with their internal customers, improving performance for all users of ArcGIS Enterprise.

ArcGIS Dashboard displaying metrics from ArcGIS Monitor

ArcGIS Monitor Displays Metrics Highlighting Need More Server Resources

"We’re able to determine where we need more resources immediately. For example, recently we noticed our hosting server began to consume more RAM (90%). We worked with our server team to get 12GB added to the VM. After the increase in RAM, the hosting server continued to use more RAM and motivated the team to look at ArcGIS Server manager and inventory the services. We noticed some new, unexpected layers published from our internal portal that were created by another team. We were able to contact that department and remove the services that were creating the impact and resolve the issue."

- Bret Fenster, GIS Supervisor, Collin County

ArcGIS Dashboard displaying metrics from ArcGIS Monitor

ArcGIS Monitor Displays Improved Performance of ArcGIS Enterprise after Increasing Server Resources & Addressing Data Publishing Governance

Is ArcGIS Monitor Right for You?

Collin County’s success with implementing ArcGIS Monitor for their ArcGIS Enterprise deployment demonstrates that the insights and resulting solutions stemming from the data collected and visualized provides value to the County’s GIS and IT teams. The ability to support observations with quantified metrics empowers Collin County’s team to maintain a performant enterprise GIS environment and reduce downtime. Blue Raster strongly recommends including Monitor in all new deployments of ArcGIS Enterprise or adding it to existing installations. If your organization would like better insights into your enterprise GIS environments, please explore our ArcGIS Monitor Page and Contact Us Today!

Contact Us Today!

Name(Required)
Email(Required)
Hi there! Need help with ArcGIS Enterprise in the cloud?

Blue Raster Exhibits and Presents at the 2023 North Carolina ArcGIS Users Group Conference

The North Carolina ArcGIS Users Group (NCAUG) 2023 conference brought together GIS professionals, industry leaders, and innovators within the North Carolina GIS community. Hosted annually by NCAUG, the event showcases a wide array of topics, from advanced spatial analytics to the practical applications of GIS in various industries. This year, the event’s theme was "Sparking Innovation: Energizing GIS Technology for the Future.”

Blue Raster Gets Involved in North Carolina

From September 26 – 29, Project Managers Chris Gabris and Ben Masters represented Blue Raster in Asheville, NC—marking our organization’s first time attending the NCAUG fall conference—where they showcased the ways our team implements innovative GIS solutions for our customers. The week began on the Reem’s Creek Golf Course for the pre-conference tournament, where Ben connected in person with other conference attendees and learned how each of his teammates utilize GIS in their day-to-day roles.

Ben and his teammates at Reem’s Creek Golf Course in Asheville, NC.
Ben and his teammates at Reem’s Creek Golf Course in Asheville, NC.

The following day kicked off the opening of the conference, exhibit hall, and plenary session. As a platinum sponsor of the conference, Chris and Ben were given the opportunity to introduce Blue Raster to the community and present company information during the Vendor Parade. The opening of the exhibit hall allowed them to connect with current customers like the Town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina businesses, and state and local government GIS professionals to understand their current GIS needs and showcase Blue Raster’s latest solutions and services.

Presenting at NCAUG

Chris and Ben presented Blue Raster’s work with the City of Manassas Park, VA, in support of the conference’s theme of innovation in GIS. The presentation told the story of how Blue Raster helped Manassas Park transform their GIS practices, bringing modern solutions to multiple departments and highlighting GIS as an authoritative source of information for city workflows. Chris and Ben covered the history of the engagement, how GIS has grown and been adopted by city employees, and how GIS integrated and improved existing systems. One highlight of the presentation was the deep dive into Manassas Park’s ArcGIS Velocity deployment for public safety and public works vehicles. The topic of real-time data in GIS was a persistent theme at the conference and Blue Raster is excited to support organizations looking to add these capabilities to their GIS practices.

Chris and Ben presenting Blue Raster’s ongoing work with the City of Manassas Park, VA.
Chris and Ben presenting Blue Raster’s ongoing work with the City of Manassas Park, VA.

Parting Thoughts

NCAUG’s fall conference was a great way to connect with GIS professionals and get more involved in the North Carolina GIS community. Both Chris and Ben enjoyed getting to meet new people and reuniting with old customers and colleagues. Blue Raster looks forward to the next NCAUG event and working with those we met at this year’s conference to help solve their GIS problems with advanced solutions.

Blue Raster and the local North Carolina Esri team continuing to build a strong partnership.
Blue Raster and the local North Carolina Esri team continuing to build a strong partnership.

Georgia Uses GIS to Match Voters with Polling Places

Ahead of the November 2022 election, the Georgia Secretary of State (SOS) Elections Division approached Esri and Blue Raster to develop an efficient, well-defined process for mapping registered voters—helping election officials ensure voters were assigned to the proper polling places after redistricting. With nearly 8 million registered voters spread across 159 counties, Georgia officials needed an affordable and efficient solution to geocode each voter in the state with a verification process that could be overseen and managed at the state and county levels. This new tool would need to be active and ready for use by the end of February 2022—a turnaround time of less than two months—in addition to training election officials.

Meeting the Distinct Needs of Georgia SOS

The Georgia SOS Elections Division required one resource that would:

  • House every county’s unique voter data
  • Alert election officials of any inconsistencies within the system
  • Allow election officials to make necessary corrections
  • Account for a variety of users and levels of permission—as state election officials would need to access records for the entire state, while officials in each county would only be granted access to the data pertaining to their jurisdiction

To accomplish the massive task of geocoding nearly 8 million registered voters, Esri and Blue Raster applied the ArcGIS System including ArcGIS Pro on its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment to process Georgia’s entire voter data file in just a matter of hours. ArcGIS StreetMap Premium allowed for fast and accurate geocoding of addresses to the building and street level. Mapped voters were intersected with new district boundaries to confirm voter assignments. With the process finalized, the team worked quickly to automate it, allowing the voter file to be received each month and fully processed and geocoded within 48 hours to ensure its ongoing accuracy.

Process overview for the 2022 Redistricting Quality Assurance Tool.
Process overview for the 2022 Redistricting Quality Assurance Tool.

Customizing 159+ Dashboards for County and State Election Officials

Once a solution was presented for geocoding, Esri and Blue Raster used the Georgia SOS 2022 Redistricting Quality Assurance Tool—an interactive, online mapping resource developed using ArcGIS Hub—to make voter data at the state and county levels accessible to Georgia’s election officials. The innovative tool features:

  1. A central landing page that is viewable to all users with an account
  2. Unique ArcGIS Dashboards that are only viewable to their corresponding state or county officials
  3. 159 automated Hub pages for each county that include instructional information and can only be accessed within officials’ jurisdiction
  4. Maps of voting districts in officials’ counties and action items they need to address, including any voter records to review
  5. Voter details—such as where they’re mapped based on the geocoding to confirm the voter is assigned to the correct polling location
  6. CSV files for voting district assignments that need to be reviewed and for any addresses that could not be placed on the map
Every time voter registration data is updated, any voter records that expose a discrepancy are flagged, and local staff can quickly review each record.
Every time voter registration data is updated, any voter records that expose a discrepancy are flagged, and local staff can quickly review each record.

By the end of February 2022, Esri and Blue Raster successfully trained Georgia election officials on the 2022 Redistricting Quality Assurance Tool to verify the accuracy of their voter records. The statewide voter record was updated monthly, and geocoded, with updates published to the Hub pages, maps, and reviewable records available within 48 hours. Election officials were reviewing their county Hub pages regularly and reporting back to the Elections Division when updates were made in the voter registration database. This ensured consistent reporting of voter record review progress and official sign-off of completion from Georgia SOS.

Video walkthrough resource provided to all Georgia election officials.
Video walkthrough resource provided to all Georgia election officials.

Explore Blue Raster’s Elections Services

See how our team can help you make sense of your voter registration files and analyses leading up to the next election—and beyond! 

Blue Raster to Exhibit at PA GIS Conference

Blue Raster will be exhibiting and presenting at the Pennsylvania GIS Conference (PA GIS) on April 10-12, 2023 in State College, PA. The conference will bring together GIS professionals from across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and beyond to share ideas, learn about new technologies, and network with colleagues.

Blue Raster will be showcasing its latest geospatial products and services, including the newest Esri technology and offerings for configurable and custom web and mobile development. Visitors to the Blue Raster booth can learn about how the company helps organizations leverage GIS technology to make informed decisions to achieve their goals.

“We’re excited to be exhibiting at the PA GIS Conference,” said Christopher Gabris,  Blue Raster's GIS Team Lead and Senior Project Manager. “This is a great opportunity for us to connect with GIS professionals and learn about their specific needs and to showcase our latest products and services. We offer a wealth of solutuions, tailored for the needs of State, County and City/Township governments, including services for emergency management, health, parks and recreation, zoning and land use, and more."

Presenting at PA GIS Conference

In addition to exhibiting, Blue Raster will also be speaking at the conference. The company's GIS experts will be sharing their knowledge and insights on the use of ArcGIS technology for Community Service, Citizens Science, and Public Engagement. The presentation will focus on how Chester County and Blue Raster collaborated to redesign and update ChescoViews, an online GIS application that provides read-only access to the County’s Land Record information. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn from the company's experts and ask questions about their own GIS projects.

About Blue Raster

Blue Raster is an Esri Gold Partner and leading provider of geospatial services. The company helps businesses and government agencies unlock the power of their geospatial data to make better decisions. Blue Raster specializes in creating custom web and mobile GIS applications, data analysis, and visualization for a wide range of clients, including government agencies, non-profit organizations, and commercial enterprises.

About the PA GIS Conference

The Pennsylvania GIS Conference (PA GIS) is the premier GIS conference in the state. The conference brings together GIS professionals from across the state to share ideas, learn about new technologies, and network with colleagues. The conference features a variety of educational sessions, keynote addresses, and networking events.

Let us know if you will be there!

Contact us today to schedule a meeting


Page 1 of 3