At this year’s Esri User Conference we asked our customers, who love our plastic lizards almost as much as they love our software products, to submit a story either about their experience with GeoExpress or about lizards — live or plastic — and we’d pick a winning story from each pile. We got a lot of amazing stories.

Okay, Tyrannosaurus is not a lizard in the scientific sense, and none of the stories were about T. Rex.

Thank you to everyone who participated.The authors of the two stories we selected as our favorites each win an iPad.

With a classic narrative of struggle and triumph that we never get tired of, Matthew Woodworth of TranSystems in Kansas City, Missouri writes:

My organization deals with fairly large amounts of raster data, and a very small storage budget.  About 2 years ago we were confronted with the situation that, not only had our server dedicated to store our raster data become completely full, but we had nearly 1Tb of GeoTIFF data provided by a client sitting on an external hard drive and nowhere to store it on the network. 

We looked at quite a few options to fix the issue including expanding our network storage, when we came across GeoExpress by LizardTech. My IT department was very impressed at the idea of compressing existing data to reduce storage space and I, being the GIS department head for my organization, had used MrSID files for years and loved the idea of not being forced to store my data offline.

We decided to purchase GeoExpress Unlimited and have never regretted it. I went from exceeding my server capacity by 25% to having nearly 65% free space afterwards without losing any information. As of the date of this letter I have not quite utilized 50% of my capacity after over a year’s worth of adding data.

Thank you LizardTech.

And from Thomas Hardy’s own Wessex region in England, Andy Nicholson of Wessex Water in Bath asks the thrilling question:

My GeoExpress Lizards – Thiefs in the Night or Innocent Bystanders?

Every quarter we complete MrSID conversions for distribution across the GIS fileservers. Last year in the office not only did we notice we were getting older – our recollection of the required settings for MrSID file creation had got so bad they had to be written down – but we also started to doubt our own sanity. It all started when someone left a Mars bar on my desk. The next morning we all noticed it showed signs of being nibbled by some small creature. We also noticed that the two LizardTech lizards that sit atop my screen – one green the other green and orange – had swapped sides.

For several days we observed they moved sides and each tasty treat we left for the “thief in the night” was nibbled or eaten completely. It was time to catch the culprits “red clawed”. We positioned a web cam to capture the crime scene. For a couple of nights nothing, then one night much to our relief we caught the thief in action:

In flagrante delicto.

The LizardTech lizards were proven innocent. Mind you, to this day we don’t know how the lizards changed sides on top of my screen.

Congratulations to Andy and Matthew. And again, thanks to all who sent us stories. We’ll see you again at next year’s user conference if not sooner!