Across every industry, GIS teams are generating more imagery than ever before, from high-resolution aerials to drone collections; from elevation surfaces to reality-capture datasets. And don’t forget the decades of legacy TIFFs, MrSids, and assorted other imagery formats stored on hard drives, servers, and virtual machines.
For many organizations, putting this imagery to work is still slow, expensive, and difficult to scale. Organizations everywhere are hitting the same wall:
- Local cache creation consumes hours and/or days
- Bandwidth limitations make base maps load slowly in the field
- Imagery gets duplicated across departments, environments, and projects
- Sharing between agencies or business units requires moving data, not referencing it
- Technology to support evolves too quickly making it nearly impossible to keep up
Let’s face it, Imagery is growing faster than infrastructure and offering solutions to these challenges is exactly why Esri launched the new ArcGIS Imagery Specialty designation. Esri now formally recognizes partners who not only understand imagery, but who can help organizations operationalize it by optimizing performance, streamlining processing, deduplicating workflows, and enabling distributed collaboration.
There is immense strategic value in pairing historic and current imagery as AI capabilities accelerate. These datasets serve as the primary fuel for sophisticated models to perform automated feature extraction and analyze long-term land-use trends. By feeding both archival records and real-time feeds into neural networks, we unlock the ability to identify patterns, from urban sprawl to environmental shifts, at a scale and speed that transforms raw pixels into actionable intelligence.
So, with enhanced architecture, cloud environments and AI capabilities, GIS teams create a single source of truth where imagery is always fast, always available, and always ready.
ROK Technologies is proud to be among the very first partners awarded this designation; a validation of years spent pioneering cloud-based imagery workflows long before they became mainstream.
As Mr. Harris shares, “long before cloud-native imagery became industry standard, we were helping offload caches, streamline workflows, and scale performance in ways traditional infrastructure couldn’t. Imagery is becoming one of the most valuable enterprise datasets organizations manage and this Imagery Specialty recognizes the outcomes we deliver for our clients everyday.”
How ROK Built Its Imagery Expertise
For more than a decade, ROK has been doing this work, helping organizations consolidate imagery, cache it efficiently, share it securely, and serve it lightning-fast from cloud storage.
In Matt Plummer’s recent webinar Cloud Ready Imagery for Distributed Teams: Consolidate. Cache. Collaborate., he shares an origin story that perfectly captures why ROK is built for this specialty.
Back in 2009, before cloud-ready imagery was common practice, ROK solved a major performance crisis for a client whose flight-tracking maps were failing under unpredictable, spiking traffic. Esri had just introduced the concept of map caching, the ability to cut an entire map service into tiles and serve those tiles as static images. But even with caching, hosting an entire cache on an ArcGIS Server machine created massive strain, consuming CPU, bandwidth, and disk space.
Jason Harris, ROK’s CTO, had a transformative idea: Move the cache out of ArcGIS Server and into cloud storage. Let ArcGIS Server reference the cache without carrying the load.
It worked. And it changed everything. ROK was one of the first organizations to offload tile caches to Amazon S3, unlocking:
- Near-limitless bandwidth
- Dramatically faster tile delivery
- Reduced strain on server infrastructure
- Lower storage costs
- Better scalability
Fast forward to today, and this pattern has become an industry standard and one that ROK has refined and scaled for dozens of customers.
Go back in the archives to read the origin story, Tiles on a Cloud: Cloud computing and ArcGIS Server deliver a thrifty solution.
Today’s Imagery Challenge: Scale, Speed, and Cloud-Native Performance
Modern imagery workflows require more than simple storage; they require intentional optimization to deliver the speed, scalability and responsiveness today’s GIS environments expect.
As Jason Harris illustrates in ROK Technologies’ deep-dive webinar Advanced Techniques to Supercharge Your ArcGIS Enterprise Performance, improperly managed imagery can drag down systems, consume resources, and slow productivity across entire organizations.
One of the most impactful advancements is the adoption of Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs), which restructure imagery so it behaves like a cache—tiled, pyramided, and ready for selective reads—dramatically accelerating both visualization and analytics.
When paired with cloud storage platforms that act as the backbone “refrigerator” for raw imagery, cache outputs, and COGs, organizations can eliminate the traditional storage and bandwidth strain placed on local servers.
ROK further enhances this model by deploying high-performance, repeatable cache-building environments. These supercharged EC2 machines spin up on demand, dedicate 100% of their compute capacity to cache creation, finish in hours what once required days, and then automatically tear down to minimize cost.
Once hosted in cloud storage, these caches can be registered as data stores in ArcGIS Enterprise, allowing the build of raster tile layers, vector tile layers, elevation layers, scene layers, imagery layers, and more directly in Portal without burdening ArcGIS Server. This architecture also unlocks seamless distributed collaboration, enabling multiple agencies or business units to work from a single authoritative source without duplication.
The result is imagery that is fast, scalable, cost-efficient, and fully ready to support modern, distributed teams.
Why Esri’s Imagery Specialty Is a Milestone for Customers (not just Partners)
The biggest takeaway isn’t that ROK earned the specialty. It’s what this specialty means for customers. Organizations now have a clear way to identify partners who can help them:
- Turn imagery into fast, reliable map layers
- Support distributed teams and interagency collaborations
- Build sustainable cloud architectures for their imagery
- Reduce cost, eliminate duplication, and boost performance
- Scale to state-wide, enterprise-wide, or global footprints
- Prepare for the next generation of drone, reality, or AI/ML workflows
Esri created the Imagery Specialty because imagery is becoming a primary data asset, not just a basemap and ROK Technologies earned the specialty because we’ve been helping customers harness that asset for years.
What’s Next? Cloud-Native Imagery Workflows for Modern GIS
The GIS industry is moving toward:
- Cloud-hosted caches
- COG-driven analytics
- Reality capture pipelines
- Distributed collaboration
- Shared source-of-truth imagery
- AI-ready imagery stores
- Cloud compute for large-scale processing
Are you ready?
ROK’s early adoption of these patterns and the hands-on experience gained from supporting over 50 imagery-driven cloud migrations places us at the forefront of this shift.
If your organization is sitting on terabytes of imagery—unused, slow, expensive, or trapped on local infrastructure—ROK Technologies can help you optimize, cache, serve and scale! All while reducing cost and boosting performance.
ROK Technologies is one of the first Esri ArcGIS Imagery Specialty partners helping GIS teams unlock the full power of their imagery in the Cloud.
