GreenSight Rapidly Expands Its Capabilities and Verticals with ISG Partnership

GreenSight is a leading autonomous aerial intelligence company, leveraging proprietary drone technology to provide end-to-end land management solutions. After years focused on military applications, the founders brought their innovative robotic system to the private sector, empowering businesses to use drone technology to maximize their data and streamline operations.

The GreenSight platform includes a suite of hardware and sensors for remote sensing and mapping, as well as software for data processing, visualization and assessment. The data collected automatically uploads to the GreenSight platform for review and analysis, giving clients an unprecedented view of challenge areas, opportunities for improvement and how to optimize resources.


 
 

Challenge: Help Clients Leverage Drone Technology to Reduce Costs and Streamline Operations

In an effort to expand its portfolio beyond the military sector, GreenSight founder and CEO, James Peverill, realized an obvious vertical to introduce its drone technology capabilities was agriculture. Golf course managers, in particular, were eager to implement drone technology to solve some of their management challenges. Unlike most crops, golf course turf requires constant attendance and expensive care. Superintendents must manually track water and fertilizers usage, disease, mowing and other factors that affect the quality of their courses.

GreenSight believed its drone technology could optimize golf course maintenance labor and materials but knew it could scale its capabilities faster by integrating the web-based Turf Cloud golf course management platform into its drone technology to operationalize the drone data. The idea was so attractive, GreenSight acquired Turf Cloud to offer a full course management solution. With a growing backlog of required features and a shortage of resources, GreenSight needed to bring in a team of experienced developers to build out their drone technology and make it scalable.


 
 

Solution: Develop a Structured, Multi-Tenant Solution to Scale

After experiencing previous challenges with outsourced developers, several of the GreenSight advisors recommended Intent Solutions Group (ISG) for its ability to help technology-focused organizations rapidly innovate and create advanced software products. “One of the biggest reasons we partnered with ISG was they had an impressive track record with program and product management,” says Peverill. “They didn’t just bring in a bunch of developers to check off tasks but engaged a dedicated team early in the development process to first understand our strengths and weaknesses, then build a management and communication foundation to ensure ongoing success.”

ISG began its work on the Turf Cloud platform, partnering with Stephen Ohlson, vice president of Product Development at GreenSight and the previous VP of Turf Cloud, to transform it from a limited product to an enterprise-grade, scalable platform that could handle a higher volume of customers. “We thought we were practicing Agile methodology, but ISG showed us how to implement it correctly through a structured process of organization, tooling, documentation and testing,” says Ohlson. “They worked with us to develop an iterative, automated process that easily scales as we add customers and expand our verticals. This was an essential step that other development companies we’ve worked with completely miss. Without it, we never would have been this far along.”

Beyond establishing a scalable process, ISG helped GreenSight transform the massive amounts of raw drone sensor and image data into actionable aerial intelligence customers can instantly use to make decisions. The innovative software automatically analyzes the data and presents it in a Google map-like environment, making it highly consumable. Built using the open-source javascript library OpenLayers.js, GreenSight’s mapping and sensor data portal is easily viewed by the golf course Superintendent on any device with an internet connection. This customizable visual representation of data provides instant visibility into areas that are over- or under-fertilized and watered to help courses optimize their resources and their use of water and fertilizer for less cost and harm to the environment.

“ISG is involved in all phases of our product development chain,” says Ohlson. “They assisted our product managers, implemented the code, executed the QA testing and the development operations that manage all of the environments and business continuity so everything is available to the client when they log in. They even helped us leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) in ways we didn’t know existed. ISG reviews our AWS invoices to ensure we are not only maximizing AWS products and services but that we are also utilizing those products in the most cost-efficient way possible - leveraging AWS funding where available to drive innovation.”

 

Results: A Disciplined Development System and Pipeline

The revolutionary drone technology enables GreenSight to give customers something no one else can - more comprehensive course data without the typical time and resources. Course supervisors can instantly access the Turf Cloud data to enable their operations, managing their entire team, equipment, and greens from a single platform. To date, hundreds of golf courses across the United States are using the Turf Cloud platform for more efficient course management.

The disciplined development system and collaboration with ISG help speed to market any new feature requests in the backlog to enable continual product enhancements. The success and scalability of the Turf Cloud platform have inspired GreenSight to expand into additional markets where drone technology is equally applicable, such as the oil and gas industry, solar industry, border security, agriculture and construction.

Now that they have a structured process and system in place, onboarding new customers and verticals is more achievable. “Having a partner like ISG has been invaluable,” says Peverill. “The speed and execution of ISG have been amazing, especially for a startup where timelines are short and expectations are high. Their innovation, engineering and technology gives us the foundation to rapidly grow our aerial intelligence business beyond anything we ever imagined possible.”

For founder and CEO of ISG, Robert Rae, the relationship drives the success. “Our relationship with the GreenSight team is indicative of the type of partnership that most growing software companies are desperately searching for,” he says. “We thrive in complex environments where we can bring our process, tools, partnerships, delivery excellence and technology excellence to bear. We are looking forward to helping GreenSight operationalize the unbelievable machine learning, artificial intelligence, and scaled IoT capabilities that they are envisioning for their platform. These capabilities are going to be game changers across a number of key channels.”