Lizardtech used the 2013 International Esri User Conference (ESRIUC) to announce the release of GeoExpress 9 – their flagship product. Lizardtech director of product management, Jon Skiffington provided an up close first look at R 9 in a special press event prior to the conference.
Recall that GeoExpress and the Express Suite is the company’s solution for efficient and rapid image compression and manipulation. With the latest release, customers will enjoy a must faster solution, 4 X faster according to Skiffington! Release 9 also provides intelligent encoding where the solution will automatically be reconfigured for optimal performance,code pending on the task at hand – or optionally, user specified based on user provided parameters. Skiffington also tells us this release makes things very simple for the user, from an easy, rapid installation through to a user interface that users can up and running with very quickly.
Observations, highlights and comments about GeoExpress 9:
- Allows for distribution of imagery over any network
- Focus is imagery but LiDAR is a big deal these days.
- MrSid and jpeg2000 are main focus
- Lossless compression, 50 percent reduction in file size or 5% of the size with no visual artifacts
- Geo viewer is the free viewer for Windows, iOS, android, with over 500,000 downloads to date
- SDKs and free tools are available for integrating support for MrSid imagery into third party apps
- Key customers are military and defense as all as commercial and large government providers.
- New at R 9 – Span multiple jobs across multiple cores and CPUs – Example, run one job spanning over 4 cores
- Images load and display faster… Biggest benefit
- Viewable in nearly every GIS product including Esri, Bentley, Intergraph, MapInfo, Google Earth, and many more.
- 20+ apps now support MG4
- Users will enjoy a new, intelligent UI

Suggested Reading:
- Blog – GeoExpress 9 at the Esri 2013 User Conference
- LizardTech Launches GeoExpress 9 at 2013 Esri International User Conference
- GeoExpress 9
- Lizardtech on Twitter @lizardtech