FME 2015: Ready for a Year of Change

“Change is the only constant in life”. So wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus roughly 2600 years ago.

I wonder what he’d make of 2015, even only two weeks in. Energy prices defying common wisdom and falling to multi-year lows, with differing impacts on government, corporate, and personal budgets. Companies and governments scrambling in aftermath of the #sonyhack to check and double check their security policies and processes (and rechecking the assertion that data held on premises is more secure than that held in the cloud). Americans now joining their Canadian cousins on the beaches of Cuba. (Cuba, the last place left where Canadians could go and not be mistaken for Americans.) Ongoing geopolitical uncertainty indeed!

In our own industry, longtime geospatial commentators and stalwarts Adena Schutzberg and Joe Francica have left their multi-year roles as editors at Directions Magazine. No longer can I count on my weekly “Directions In the News Podcast” to give me their take on the latest industry trends and news. Hang in there, Very Spatial Podcast!

Against this backdrop of change, in the last few hours both Sony and Target have announced plans to close all their Canadian stores. And Google has announced that “Google Glass” has been cancelled, at least as we’ve known it.

All of this signals change in the air as never before, and big bold decisions can and will be made by organizations as they attempt to get ahead of it. We all have to do our best to anticipate and embrace these ever-increasing and often surprising changes.

Which brings us to FME 2015.

Today we released FME 2015.0, the result of another year of innovation and toil by the technical team here at Safe. We’ve worked very hard to make it ready to help our customers react to the change that most certainly will be foisted upon them over the next 365 days. Whether it is moving data up to the cloud, or bringing it back home from the cloud—FME 2015 is ready. Whether it is using the latest OGC standards, or working with E00 files—FME 2015 can answer the call. Whether you’ve got CSV files, or BIM files, or CSV files you want turned into BIM files, we got you covered.

Speaking of change, just quantifying the changes in FME 2015 has been a big task. The “highlights” by some count number more than 1000, and have a total word count long enough to be a chapter in The Hobbit. Our goal is that each of these will naturally improve, speed, and smooth your interactions with FME, and if we’ve done our job, will hardly be noticed.

Because we know that “you can’t stop progress”, FME 2015 also contains significant foundational work that will allow future releases to be ready for changes, whatever they may be, in our technology landscape.

Here at Safe, we’re also making changes, building the foundation for an expanded, stronger company, better able than ever to quickly get solutions into our customers’ hands.

Change can be scary, or it can be exciting. It is all a matter of attitude. As my first employer Dr. John MacDonald, founder of MDA, was fond of saying, “The flip side of every problem is an opportunity”. We’re confident that by putting FME 2015 in the hands of our customers, we’ve positioned them to turn the data problems they encounter on a daily basis into opportunities. Our goal is to enable organizations to work more easily with their data, freeing them to make informed decisions, and ultimately thrive in our ever-changing world.

Read Part 2: A Week of Geospatial Change seen through a HoloLens

David Bowie is excited about what 2015 will bring.