Caliper Corporation headquartered in Newton offers Maptitude, designed to be a robust and easy-to-use professional Location Intelligence (LI) tool. Maptitude provides features that allow the user to take advantage of the geographic elements of enterprise (or government) data, and to effectively explore information.
N/A
Surfer
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Surfer is a data visualization suite from Golden Software in Colorado for oil and gas companies, or other entities in other industries requiring geological or environmental data.
In logistics it is great for allocating customers to their nearest warehouse through a process called tagging. For marketing, you can prioritise sales leads and carry out competitor adjacency analysis. For field-based roles it's useful for calculating work content, and for membership organisations and similar situations, it can be used to look for clusters with similar interests.
Surfer has been excellent for us, a small company, to process the electrical resistivity, refraction microtremor, and MASW data collected in the field. There are an increasing number of programs capable of assisting in this geophysical analysis but Surfer is the most advanced. The ability to create both 2D and 3D figures in the program while managing data is a huge help. It also greatly improved report quality and helped clients better understand what the results were for a study.
The user interface can be tricky at first. It's a little rough around the edges and takes a little time to get the hang of.
Not an ideal application for older employees. There are too many things with the interface that make it not worthwhile to train employees with less computer experience.
Manipulating data within Surfer is difficult because you have to do things in a certain order. Not terrible if you get the hang of it but certainly frustrating at first.
Maptitude is far superior to this API. It provides the ability to utilize your data in many different ways. The only program that came close to this was Microsoft Maps, and that program is no longer supported. If you are looking for a great program to map your sales data, with several tools to help not only see and understand your data in a graphical format, Maptitude is a winner!
Surfer is very unique with respect to its capabilities. I am not aware of any other mapping software that is at the same time flexible, has a friendly interface, and creates such nice-looking maps.
I used to use ultra low cost MapPoint. Maptitude, while being at a slightly higher price point, is just streets ahead of what MapPoint could do and but at a price where I don't need to charge my clients any extra for using it.
The worst thing about Surfer is the cost. My company can only afford one license at the moment which means only one employee gets to use it regularly. Not so great when someone is sick or you have a huge wave of projects.
The user interface is a little rough but younger employees have been great at catching on quickly and producing great images.
There's nothing else quite like Surfer. It's versatile and not to difficult to use so, though the licenses are expensive, it is an excellent program that has done wonders for our company!
