Keynote address at FME Worldwide User Conference (post number 100!)

Just a short post to say that I will be giving the keynote address at the Safe Software FME Worldwide User Conference 2008, which will be in Vancouver on March 6-7, at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue which is where the GeoWeb conference was held, and which is a great venue with its "in the round" main hall.

I have known the co-founders of Safe, Don Murray and Dale Lutz (pictured here in the Safe Insider Newsletter), since the very early days of Smallworld. They founded the company in 1993, which was the same year that we began in North America with Smallworld. We had an early mutual customer in electric utility BC Hydro, and I remember being introduced to them when Safe was still relatively unknown, by Marv Everett, who ran the transmission system GIS at BC Hydro back then (who incidentally is now retired and living in Campbell River on Vancouver Island, and enjoying spending time on his boat - see the picture below).

The BC government provided data back then in a format called SAIF, which BC Hydro needed to use, and Safe Software were the experts in this (which is where the company name came from). Marv was a big advocate of Safe, and they became a key business partner for Smallworld across our whole customer base after that initial BC Hydro project. And of course Safe works with all the major GIS vendors, so that partnership continued through my time at Intergraph.

Anyway, enough reminiscing ... I am very pleased to see how successful Don and Dale have been with Safe since then, and look forward to attending the FME conference, and spending some time in Vancouver which is one of my favorite cities.

Oh, I almost forgot (this ended up not being such a short post after all) - this is my 100th post since I began blogging on April 20th this year. It's been fun so far!