PelicanCorp Delivers: An Access Ecosystem

Planet Underground spoke with Duane Rodgers, CEO of PelicanCorp, utility industry leaders in one-call systems across the globe, to discuss their new and evolving all-in-one solution to data access and collaboration—the Damage Prevention Platform.

The idea of the Damage Prevention Platform was built around an “ecosystem” of our existing products for the industry—our Access^TM product stacks such as OneCallAccess, TicketAccess, DamageAccess and others. We had always thought about the integration of these and how they work, either independently or tying together. But as we started looking at more and more deployments of different solutions around the world, we were finding a need to have multiple products interface and share data.

“Foremost, it’s about speed of development, lowering costs and a single point of truth.” -Duane Rodgers

The idea for a Damage Prevention Platform came about to build products to support those data entry and exit points. It’s about taking all the products we have in our stack and allowing them to work together. There’s a new momentum around “digital platforms” describing interactions across components, products and solutions. The idea of a damage prevention platform is allowing our products the capability to talk between each other and with others’ products as well, to allow data exchange and collaboration between everyone, from the one-call, to the utilities and municipalities, right through to the excavators, locators and engineers in the field.

So it’s a system that’s integrating all your best software components in use across the industry?
Correct. All of our products are now heading towards this philosophy, and this would support new acquisitions as well. We have some legacy products from these acquisitions like TelDig and more recently, the Geolantis platform. Geolantis, in its own right, is a type of field management platform, where you can build a product for the field based on what your needs are. We wanted to make sure that the Geolantis product would integrate into our ecosystem and support our goals in the Damage Prevention Platform.

We also wanted the collaboration (WorksAccess) system to be able to talk directly to one-call permitting (PermitAccess) and now, Geolantis.360. We wanted the permitting system to be able to talk back to our other two or three products. You can technically start with any one product, and then pass data across the other products, which would build a consistent transaction across those systems.