My guess the name Larry Spraker doesn’t need much of an introduction across the New York State and New England GIS landscape.   His work and contributions since the late 1980s to the geospatial community are many and have included efforts from academia, government, and for many years the private sector.  As well as a ton of volunteer work with GIS user groups and the like. It has been an privilege crossing paths with him in so many ways over the years.  

So depending on the time of day, I recommend grabbing your favorite beverage, pull up a chair and continue reading.  There’s a lot here.  And after you are done, close your eyes and envision Mr. Spraker in another time or comos. Or, as the immortal Rod Sterling would say on the Twilight Zone “Another Dimension”.  Under the bright lights, behind the desk, and waving his hands fevorishly.  Yup, that’s him in his new gig – performing his best Chris Berman “Swami Sez” imitation as he hosts the 6PM ESPN SportsCenter broadcast.

Enjoy.

eSpatiallyNewYork:  Let’s start from the beginning.   The Albany-area boy goes to SUNY Albany for undergraduate and then on to Indiana State for graduate work.  How and when did geography become your educational and professional focus? 

Spraker:  I originally went to UAlbany as a Communications major with aspirations to be a sportswriter. After realizing that was a tough gig that didn’t pay particularly well (at least back in the early 80’s), someone recommended Computer Science. After a few courses, I really liked programming, but hated the high-end math courses such as Calculus and Differential Equations. A minor in Computer Science didn’t require the math courses, so I went to my advisor and asked “What would be a good major with a Computer Science minor?”. He listed a number of majors that included Physics, Math, and the last one he mentioned was Geography. I had already taken 6 credits in Geography as electives, so I asked for more details and somehow this guy had a fair bit of knowledge in this area and explained just enough of cartography, GIS and remote sensing to pique my interest. I registered for Intro to Cartography and Intro to Remote Sensing the next semester and fell in love with the both courses, and quickly found my new major. I focused primarily in Remote Sensing as an undergrad, and my professor, Floyd Henderson, really encouraged me to go graduate school. At the time Indiana State University was a leading remote sensing program, having the first remote terminals into the mainframe computers at Purdue which was the state of the art for image processing software. Floyd knew the professors at ISU, wrote me a recommendation and helped me get a Research Assistantship, so I packed up my car with everything I owned and drove to Terre Haute, Indiana for 2 years and finished my Masters. Although I focused a lot on Remote Sensing, I got exposed to a lot of GIS as well, and by the end of grad school had really got the GIS bug.

As an aside, after I graduated from ISU and came back to the Capital District, Floyd called me and asked me if I would teach his Intro to Remote Sensing and Aerial Photo Interpretation classes while he was away on sabbatical that year. So I returned to SUNY Albany as an adjunct professor and taught his classes that year. When Floyd returned, I stayed on as an adjunct faculty member and transitioned to developing and teaching several GIS courses. I really enjoyed working with the students and ended up teaching at SUNY Albany for 17 years.

 

eSpatiallyNewYork:  Where do you land after grad school? 

Spraker:  After finishing my Masters degree at Indiana State, I got a job as the Research Director at a place called the “State Parks Management and Research Institute” located in the Saratoga Spa State Park. It was a very interesting place to work and provided me with a tremendous opportunity as my very first GIS job. It was organized as a public benefit corporation under the NYS Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (OPRHP) and served as an applied research “think tank”. We had corporate sponsors that donated, loaned or consigned hardware and software to us to be used in cutting edge ways to conduct projects for OPRHP and other NYS agencies. We would invite staff to come to the Institute to participate as research fellows and use our facility to conduct their projects. A very interesting model that allowed me to get trained in a lot of hardware and software, as well as participate in a lot of projects with a variety of government agencies. I was responsible for the administration and management of all the systems, training the incoming fellows and serving as their technical advisor, and helping them implement technology for their projects. Mind you this was when I was only 24 and didn’t have much experience at all. One of our corporate sponsors was Esri, so with my GIS background, we ended up focusing quite a bit of our efforts in the GIS world. This was in the late 80’s so GIS was still in its infancy in NYS. In addition to OPRHP, I was fortunate to get involved with significant GIS projects for a number of NYS and federal agencies such as:

• Developing the first GIS layer of the National Register Listing of Historic Places for OPRHP from a text file provided by the National Park Service, and training the State Historic Preservation Office to maintain the layer in ARC/INFO and later in ArcView 2.0;
• Building a highly detailed GIS database for the Clermont Historic Site;
• Working with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and State Emergency Management Office (SEMO) to develop a database and analytical tools for the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI);
• Working with the SEMO on developing their initial earthquake preparedness plan;
• Working with the NYS Thruway Authority on conducting an inventory and analysis of the resources along the Erie Canal;
• Working with the Hudson River Valley Greenway Council to build a GIS database of the resources within the greenway.  

An interesting side note… in our work with the Hudson Valley Greenway Council, this is where I first met Kathy Fisher (who would later become my business partner at Applied GIS). Kathy was the Council’s GIS manager and her GIS Analyst was Paul Rooney (now at Esri). After Paul left the Greenway Council, I hired him at the Research Institute as a GIS Analyst where we worked together for several years and became good friends.

eSpatiallyNewYork:  You had to be using some prehistoric GIS software and hardware components during this period.  What was on the list?

Spraker:  In grad school back in 1985 we started with predominantly raster GIS. We were using the original IMGRID software (basically the first raster GIS). The first vector GIS I used was SAGIS (from the US Forest Service), with the old green phosphorous, Tektronix terminals. When I arrived at the Research Institute in the late 80’s, we had ARC/INFO from Esri, which at the time was at version 3.2 I believe, and then we quickly upgraded to 4.0, which is what most of my early work was done on. We were running ARC/INFO on Prime minicomputers (basically mainframes), then later on HP Unix workstations when ARC/INFO was released on HP. This was of course in the days of “command line” ARC/INFO, the coverage data model (before shapefiles), and the beloved (or not so beloved) INFO database management system from Henco software (BTW, Henco is one of my go to trivia questions for “seasoned” GIS folks). Just to give folks an idea of the technology back then, I used to backup our Prime minicomputer onto the old 9-track reel tapes. Also, when I had to transfer data between the Prime minicomputer and our HP Unix workstation, I used to connect a serial cable, and use Kermit software to transfer the files at 9600 baud (yes, about 20% of the speed of the old 56kbs dialup modems).

eSpatiallyNewYork:  After public service you formed a small consulting firm Applied GIS – tell us a little bit about that and how it got started. Include teaming up with Austin Fisher.

Spraker:  This is truly “it’s a small world” story. As I mentioned earlier, one of the projects we helped with at the Research Institute was the NYS Canal Inventory project with the NYS Thruway Authority (around 1991/1992). Specifically, the Thruway Authority hired The Saratoga Associates to conduct the project, who had brought on a small, two person GIS consulting firm, Fisher Associates to do most of the heavy duty GIS work. Fisher Associates was comprised of Austin and Kathy Fisher. Austin was the former Director of Data Products at MapInfo, while his wife Kathy, who was my former colleague, had left the Hudson River Valley Greenway Council. When they landed the Canal Inventory Project, it ideally required workstation ARC/INFO which they did not own yet. Since Kathy and I had worked together several years earlier, they asked me if we (the Research Institute) could partner with them to provide an ARC/INFO workstation, along with my technical support and guidance. That was when I first met Austin. Austin and I hit it off quite well, we were both type A personalities, both passionate about GIS, and made a good team. At some point in 1992, Austin and Kathy decided to incorporate and changed the company name from Fisher Associates to Applied GIS, Inc. In Spring of 1993, as the Canal Inventory project was winding down, Austin and I were playing basketball and he asked me if I wanted to join them as a full partner and really try to grow Applied GIS beyond a small family business. I was quite interested and always had thought about the consulting world, but at the time I really liked my job at the Research Institute, was a fairly new homeowner, and actually turned them down. Then later that fall, the topic came up again, and this time I gave them a tentative yes. We had a meeting at their house where I asked them, based on their current contracts, how much could the company afford to pay me in a worst-case scenario. I will never forget, after a quick analysis, Austin told me they could guarantee me $9,000 for the year. That certainly wasn’t going to pay the bills, but somehow, we were confident we would be successful, so after 5 years at the Research Institute, I left and joined them as a partner in Applied GIS in November, 1993. Together we had a few PCs, but we really needed a Unix workstation and ARC/INFO to do high-end GIS work. So, Austin and Kathy maxed out their credit cards and bought a refurbished, Hewlett Packard (HP) Unix workstation, and I maxed out my credit cards and bought ARC/INFO software from Esri. We were extremely fortunate early on winning several substantial contracts in our first year with Niagara Mohawk (now National Grid), NYS Department of Public Service and a few others, and paid off our credit cards quickly. Believe it or not, that was the only real debt we incurred in our 23 years in business. Not too long after I had joined them, Kathy had their first child and ended up reducing her hours down to a part-time role, so Austin and I ended up taking the lead on building the business, and as they say, the rest is history.

We were one of the first GIS firms within NY, and quickly became one of the leading providers of GIS services in the state. Being located in the Capital District, we were heavily focused on the public sector and worked with the vast majority of NYS Agencies over the years on countless GIS projects. We also worked for probably half of the counties in New York, as well as many municipalities. We had our share of private clients as well, but the overwhelming majority of our business was in the public sector. One of the big things in the 90’s was the NY State Archive and Records Administration (SARA) grants for GIS implementation. These were awarded to counties and municipalities each year, but the requirement was that they first must conduct a GIS Needs Assessment. So many would get a SARA grant to do a needs assessment, conceptual design and implementation plan, then seek a second grant to implement GIS technology based on the plan that was developed for them. This was a tremendous source of business, and we did a ton of GIS needs assessments over the years, as well as many of the subsequent implementations. We worked on a wide variety of projects over the years with a gradual transition from more “traditional” GIS projects focused on mapping and analysis to custom application development, particularly web-based GIS solutions.  

eSpatiallyNewYork:  Applied GIS was then acquired by Fountains, an overseas firm?  

Spraker:  In 2004, we were working on a forestry project for the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation with a subcontractor named Fountains Forestry. Their parent company was a UK-based firm named Fountains. Near the end of the project, we were asked if we were interested in being acquired. Fountains was expanding through strategic acquisitions and the GIS industry was one of their targets. We were surprised they would consider a US-based GIS firm, but after quite a bit of consideration we decided to move forward with the acquisition and sold our firm to Fountains (UK). They decided to rebrand Applied GIS as “Fountains Spatial” and we continued on with our Northeast based GIS business. However, we also quickly started to do GIS work in the UK. We began by travelling around England to various Fountains offices conducting a company-wide GIS needs assessment. We identified a number of GIS initiatives, and started to implement a few of their highest priorities, the first of which was a spatially enabled system for managing vegetation around electric transmission lines. It included a field data collection system, based on ArcPad and Laser Range Finders for measuring the closest vegetation to the lines, and a backend mapping, management and work order system that leveraged ArcIMS. The first three years were quite exciting as we implemented GIS technology in a variety of ways throughout Fountains, with several of us spending quite a bit of time in the UK. However, Fountains then ran into financial issues and the US subsidiaries (including Fountains Spatial) ended up getting sold several times over the next few years to different UK firms, causing a pretty stressful series of starts and stops. Throughout the turmoil, we continued to successfully conduct our “normal” GIS business here in the Northeastern US, but being owned by a constantly changing UK presence proved to be very challenging.

eSpatiallyNewYork:  In 2016, Fountains Spatial was acquired by VHB.  Tell us a little bit about that and what your position there is now.

Spraker:  In the fall of 2015, I was contacted by a long time GIS colleague of mine, Steve Anderson, who had joined VHB to start the Applied Technologies group. Steve had started to assemble a team at VHB, which included another long-time colleague, Sam Berg who had been with Esri for 20 years. Steve knew about our challenges with our current UK parent company and asked if we were interested in being acquired by VHB and joining the Applied Technology group. It was a great opportunity, and so I helped broker a deal between VHB and our UK parent company to extract us and allow us to join VHB. Fountains Spatial officially joined VHB in February of 2016, and our entire staff moved from our long time Schenectady office to VHB’s Albany office. I was appointed the Northeast Regional Manager of Applied Technology, which is my current position. I focus on the implementation of technology directly with our clients in a typical “consulting” role, as well as working with our other market and service leaders to assist them in integrating technology into their solutions. One of the most enjoyable things about working at VHB is being able to work with so many colleagues that are subject matter experts in a wide variety of disciplines such as transportation, environmental services, land development, energy, surveying, planning/design and many others. As a small consulting firm that focused exclusively on GIS technology for so long, we didn’t have subject matter experts on staff, so if we needed an engineer, surveyor or environmental professional, we had to work with a subcontractor. It is refreshing and energizing to work with such a talented group of professionals representing so many different disciplines.

eSpatiallyNewYork:  Over the years, you have volunteered and contributed much to the New York State and New England GIS user communities.  What are some of the positions and boards you have held in this capacity?

Spraker:  Around 1990, myself and Marty Goldblatt from the NYS Office of Real Property Services started the Capital District ARC/INFO Users group (CAPARC). This started as a quarterly (later semi-annual) user group meeting for Esri ARC/INFO users in the Albany area. We rotated the location among the NYS agencies and usually had between 40-80 users attend as well as invited Esri staff from the Boston office. CAPARC continued on for close to 20 years but no longer exists. 

In 1989, I started attending the Northeast Arc Users Group (NEARC) conferences. For those that don’t know, NEARC is a much larger regional Esri user group covering seven states with a three-day conference in the Fall which draws 300-500 attendees, and a one-day conference in the Spring. I served as President of NEARC from 1994-1996, and then remained on the board for two additional years. I have also served as the conference chair for the Annual Fall NEARC conference three times and the Spring conference once. 

The NYS GIS Association is our state organization of GIS professionals, which hosts a two-day conference (NYGeoCon) every other year, with a one-day NYS GIS Summit on the off years. I have been active in the NYS GIS Association from the very beginning, served on the NYS GIS Association Board from 2016-2018 and was the conference chair of NYGeoCon in 2018.

I also served on a number of committees including the Private Sector Advisory Committee for the Governor’s Information Resource Management Task Force on GIS, and the Data Coordination Work Group for the Governors Office for Technology.

eSpatiallyNewYork:  Getting started with a career in GIS used to be becoming proficient with the desktop client.  Now everything has changed with so many technologies intersecting in the GIS/geospatial space.  What’s your advice in 2020 to students or individuals making career changes on where to jump in?  What to study or get a degree in?  Where do you see the demand going over the next five years? 

Spraker:  When I started in GIS back in the 80’s, the biggest hurdle was the lack of geographic data (particularly vector data). The availability of statewide layers was very hit or miss, and we didn’t have true nationwide data sets for roads, administrative boundaries, water features until the TIGER files were released by the Census Bureau in the early 90’s. Lack of geospatial data was a major obstacle for many years.

Today, it is almost the complete opposite. That is, with technological advances, data is typically not an issue and in fact in many cases we have too much data to process. There are so many different sources including remotely sensed data collected via drones (e.g., LIDAR, orthophotography), mobile data collection using handheld devices, crowdsourced data, real time sensors and more. The abundance of data options can make it difficult to select the most appropriate data to be used, while the sheer size of some data sets can make it challenging to process data in an efficient manner. Therefore, students or individuals getting started today should focus on learning about technologies and disciplines that help them analyze, process and leverage data in unique ways. I think some important disciplines to get involved with (other than GIS) are data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality/augmented reality, cloud computing and big data analytics.

eSpatiallyNewYork:  Any comments or thoughts on Open Source?

As a long time Business Partner of Esri, we do not do much in the open source world. This is a challenging topic that often has passionate folks on both sides of the fence. My opinion is that open source solutions are great and typically offer a low cost (or free) option for individuals, educational institutions and small organizations (e.g., small municipal governments) to get access to GIS technology with a low barrier to entry. However, open source will always face challenges when you start to talk about implementing large scale, enterprise-wide GIS solutions (e.g., large corporations/State and Federal agencies). That is, while it is significantly less expensive, there is typically no single entity that is ultimately responsible for support, fixing bugs, security, enhancements and providing a guarantee that the product/platform will continue to evolve and have continued releases in the future. Therefore, it is often “worth the money” to implement a traditional software product with a single vendor that is contractually responsible for both the short and long term growth and support of the product. More specifically, the software vendors financial need for the product to be successful is ultimately the “insurance” that larger organizations leverage to feel comfortable making large scale investments in technology at an enterprise level.

eSpatiallyNewYork:  Your long body of work in so many capacities in the field, does any one project stand out as your most rewarding?  The one you are most proud of?  

There are so many that stand out, but I will go back to our first year of Applied GIS (1994) when we had very limited technical resources and things were much more challenging. We won a large project for the Gas Division of one of the largest NY utilities, Niagara Mohawk (now National Grid). It was a marketing project where their goal was to identify their existing electric customers (that weren’t also a gas customer) that were located along a gas main so that they knew they were a candidate and could target the marketing of their gas services to them. The problem was they didn’t have a solid digital map of where their gas mains were located, so we had to get very creative. Back in the day, when you successfully geocoded (i.e., address matched) an address in ARC/INFO, it populated a field for the point with the id of the road segment to which the address was geocoded (this was very advanced in 1994). We geocoded all their gas customers, and then selected all the road segments that had at least one gas customer geocoded. This subset of road segments became our approximation of their gas main network (and it turned out to be exceptionally close). We then geocoded the electric customers to the same road network, and quite simply, those customers that geocoded to a road segment that had already been designated as a “gas main” was a customer that could be targeted since the assumption was that gas service was available at that location. We identified approximately 150,000 potential customers for their gas marketing campaign which proved to be extremely successful for them. We literally brought our entire UNIX workstation, and bulky CRT monitor and external 3.5gb disk drive out to Syracuse to do our final presentation and demo of the results. The project was so successful, we ended up conducting the same exact analysis for PECO energy (Philadelphia) the next year. This project was our first significant job that kickstarted us financially. In fact, it was such a significant moment, I still have a copy of that check today, 26 years later.

eSpatiallyNewYork:  What’s your response to the idea/concept that government on-premise GIS programs will continue to get smaller and smaller (less staffing/personnel and infrastructure) over the next several years as organizations continue to migrate to the Cloud.

We are seeing more and more governments migrating to the cloud, and I think this trend will continue. There is just so much flexibility with cloud environments, and so many advantages over on-premise deployments that any organization should strongly consider moving in that direction. The cloud is clearly the future and it is just a matter of time before it becomes the norm in most situations. One of the things that occasionally holds back the migration to a cloud implementation is discomfort with having sensitive data physically stored outside of the “four walls” of the organization. However, it is important to note that it does not have to be an “all or nothing” scenario. That is, many organizations (including VHB) use a hybrid approach where some systems are deployed on-premise and others leverage cloud computing. 

eSpatiallyNewYork:  If you had the chance to do it all over again and didn’t go the GIS/geospatial path – what would it be?  Chef?  River Guide?  Radio DJ? Banker?  Time to come clean.

Spraker: As I mentioned earlier, I originally wanted to be a sportswriter and started as a Communications major. Since I love sports, and ESPN was in its infancy in the 80’s, I often think that I probably would have pursued being a sportscaster on ESPN. I can definitely see an alternate universe where I didn’t change majors and ended up on ESPN hosting SportsCenter.

eSpatiallyNewYork: Most know you are a rabid Patriots fan.  My neighbor is a rabid Jets fan.  With Brady and Gronk playing together again in the Tampa Bay sun, the word on my culdesac has the Pats in a nosedive and no better than 11-7 in 2020.  Care to comment?

Spraker:  Yes, myself and several members in our extended family bought season tickets to the Patriots back in 1993 when Parcells was hired as the Head Coach. So, while I am sad to see the end of an era with Brady leaving us, I cannot complain after 6 Superbowl rings and one of the most significant Dynasty’s in all of sports!

Contact:

Larry Spraker
Principal, Northeast Regional Service Leader – Technology
518.389.3636
lspraker@VHB.com
www.vhb.com