Why Wall Street Is Learning to Love Interactive Mapping

GIS can be an important tool to add critical value to business intelligence applications, and can become useful and utilized even in markets like Financial Services. By pushing for open global standards for data, applications can be built to help promote knowledge and understanding while also providing an ability to enhance global investments.

To better understand the Energy marketplace you need to understand the infrastructure. And to understand the infrastructure you must understand the assets. With Bloomberg Interactive Maps (BMAP), we’ve created a strategic decision-support tool that represents data in a visual manner. And, all this is available within the fastest, most interactive mapping platform currently available to the marketplace.

As we researched available technologies to develop the BMAP application within the Bloomberg environment, we faced many challenges. A decision had been made to use Microsoft Bing Maps for map data and the basic interactive features but with Bloomberg being a high end product we knew users and prospects would expect us to deliver a system that is smarter, smoother, and faster than what they’ve seen on the Web. In addition we had to be prepared to display complex data like pipeline networks, storm tracks, and weather contours. To accommodate these requirements and improve performance we focused our efforts on developing BMAP using Microsoft Silverlight, a multi-media application. Our implementation of Silverlight is groundbreaking in that it differs from the standard implementation which requires the application to run within a web browser. The Bloomberg SmartClient team was able to develop a proprietary hosting program that allows our BMAP Silverlight application to run inside a Bloomberg window. Coupled with the proprietary Silverlight BMapViewer developed by Commodities R&D we have created a system that is superior to all comparable tools currently available in the market.

BMAP will help our clients answer vital questions and display answers to queries using maps and other visual formats. By providing “big picture” understanding of activity and events in real-time, while simultaneously providing granularity of information, Bloomberg clients can build complex impact and response models based on current data. Most importantly, our clients can customize multiple datasets into a single interactive view to determine relationships, patterns and impacts before and as events are happening, not after, when it’s too late.

BMAP is the ultimate infrastructure tool which combines lightning fast interactivity along with aggregation of multiple points of analysis. Combine assets with vessels and ports, real-time weather, railroads, satellite imagery and more. Furthermore, BMAP also tracks real-time global severe weather including hurricanes, typhoons, monsoons, tropical storms and tropical depressions. But, most importantly, BMAP provides damage/impact forecasts on refineries worldwide and for the entire oil, power and gas infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico.

GIS can provide the most comprehensive end-to-end analysis tool for both financial and physical energy market participants, and we’d love to show you how.