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Four frequently asked questions about ArcGIS Velocity

From utilities and public works departments to transportation authorities and beyond, organizations across the country are adopting digital transformation initiatives to improve their ability to meet their mandates. Increasingly, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are a critical element of this digital transformation, enabling organizations to draw a huge amount of real-time data from multiple sources in the physical world such as traffic lights, meters, and vehicles. However, without a way to make sense of this data, it remains just that, data.

ArcGIS Velocity is a cloud-native add-on capability for ArcGIS Online designed to process, visualize, and analyze real-time data from IoT platforms and sensors, message brokers and third-party APIs. By leveraging your real-time spatial data, it supports essential operations such as predictive maintenance, process and workflow optimization and the remote monitoring of assets. Since launching ArcGIS Velocity, we’ve encountered several frequently asked questions from customers. Below, we address four of the most common.

Views from ArcGIS Velocity showing examples of connections to data feeds and visual analysis

Views from ArcGIS Velocity showing examples of connections to data feeds and visual analysis

Is ArcGIS Velocity an alternative to ArcGIS GeoEvent Server?

ArcGIS Velocity and ArcGIS GeoEvent Server are both designed to process and analyze real-time data, but they differ in two main important respects:

  • ArcGIS Velocity is a SaaS offering as part of ArcGIS Online while GeoEvent Server is a part of ArcGIS Enterprise, which is deployed on premises.
  • ArcGIS Velocity uses a Kubernetes micro-services architecture; cloud infrastructure to ingest, process, and analyze up to thousands of records per second. Velocity supports higher volumes of real-time data compared to GeoEvent Server, which uses traditional server infrastructure.

If ArcGIS Velocity can issue alerts, can it also automate other system activities?

Yes. ArcGIS Velocity allows you to schedule big data analytics to run periodically or at a recurring time. This helps you perform processing in near real-time, conduct repeated analysis on data collected within a specific timespan and generate up-to-date information products to support the organization.

Do I retain ownership of my data when it is uploaded to ArcGIS Online?
Yes. Any data held in your ArcGIS Online organization belongs to your organization.

Can ArcGIS Velocity support and manage two-way communication, such as analyzing incoming source data but also allow operators to control devices in the field?

Yes. A good example of this is two-way communication is that involving streetlights through our partnership with Bell.
 

Want to know more?
Get answers to more frequently asked questions about ArcGIS Velocity.
Learn more about ArcGIS Velocity.
For further inquiries, contact your account manager or reach out to us here.

This post was translated to French and can be viewed here.

About the Author

Dave Monaghan is the Internet of Things (IoT) Industry Manager for Esri Canada. He advises on the practical applications of IoT across multiple businesses and helps customers embrace geospatial technologies. As a GIS and IoT specialist, Dave helps government and commercial organizations to empower their businesses by leveraging location intelligence, the cloud, real-time data and big data analytics.

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