Royce Geospatial Consultants, Inc
Beyond Traditional GIS Tradecraft

Standing on the back deck of his dad’s Chesapeake Bay crabbing boat, a 15 year old Dave Sterling, already working many years in his family’s fishing business, has many questions materializing in his mind. “Why are fish located in this place at this time?” “What is the significance of the water depth, the water temperature, the tides, the relative bait sources?” “How do I pull this all together to bring home a big catch?” Coming from a fourth generation commercial fishing family, Sterling’s zeal for fishing drives his passion for navigation and mapping his fishing waters he was raised on—marking his first dabble into geospatial analysis! In the later days, this very passion drew Sterling to found Royce Geospatial Consultants, the company focused on both strategic and tactical support of Federal agencies, providing consulting services to effectively navigate the GIS/Geospatial tradecraft space.

With personnel writing custom code or embedded overseas in active warzones, R oyce’s s trength l ies i n t heir ability to expand beyond traditional GIS tradecraft—providing integration support with emerging technologies such as advanced cloud architecture design, big data analytics and advanced geospatial / multi-discipline intelligence tradecraft. Royce’s customers range from technology executives to information officers to staff sergeants, all who need geospatial data analyzed faster. “They need analysis to happen faster so they can create further actionable intelligence or be able to ask new questions, i.e. determine why this place in the world is important or why should we invest more money in acquiring a particular dataset to support a mission,” adds Sterling, who also leads the company as its CEO. The firm incorporates advanced analytics with readily persistent geospatial data (data as a service) to meet these needs.

Traditionally, analysts would have to scour through months of historical geospatial datasets and other databases to determine trends, likelihoods, and significance. With the integration of several GOTS, COTS and custom coding using open source code/tools, Royce’s Software and Intelligence support staff reduce months of data mining and geoprocessing to hours. The firm partners with the government agencies and military partners to assist them in developing geospatial analytic models that help find objects of influence and determine the level of importance based on significant activities and events.

With the integration of several GOTS, COTS and custom coding using open source code/tools, Royce’s Software and Intelligence support staff reduce months of data mining and geoprocessing to hours

A training curriculum for advanced geospatial analytics is also developed and delivered by the firm in partnership with the U.S. government agencies and military. Royce readily leverages data sources residing in a Geospatial “Data-Lake” construct— allowing for expanded indexing, discovery and usage of a wide variety of geospatial datasets. In one instance, Royce assisted one of their many customers by turning a highly manual query, analyze, report process to fully automated one in less than a month— leveraging their advanced geospatial and modeling techniques. “We provided our Warfighter partners a capability to analyze years’ of geospatial data, a process that took up to months, down to minutes/hours in a day”, say Sterling. The focus of Royce is to capture clunky GIS datasets and convert them to an on-demand service.

At the core of its management, Royce was founded by blue collar, “get the job done,” employees. Over 1/3rd of the firm’s workforce are veterans of the U.S. Armed Forces, and the firm takes pride in affecting the outcomes of mission stakeholders in the Defense and Intelligence Community. Backed by smart engineers and analysts, Royce cultivates a culture that out-flanks any of their competitions’ strategies. “At the end of the day, our people and their willingness to do the creative, be bold, ask hard questions, and work a little harder than anyone else is what wins. “Culture eats Strategy for lunch, always,” says Sterling. Looking forward, the firm envisages creating an intersection of open source, commercial and U.S. military geospatial tradecraft methodologies to solve hard problems and offer unique solutions. The company is standing firm at the beginning of what will be an explosive rate of growth in terms of new data, emerging tradecraft, and most importantly—answers.