Norway's Powel AS today sold the assets of its U.S. subsidiary Powel, Inc., to digital mapping, imaging and data acquisition services firm GeoDigital International Inc. The deal strengthens GeoDigital's position as a leading provider of distributed infrastructure management solutions, and adds Powel's mobile work management product line, including the WorkStudio application suite for managing utility field design, outage recovery and mapping.
 

GeoDigital, has offices across the U.S. and Canada, with offices located throughout Canada and the United States. The company has mapped more than 480,000 km (nearly 300,000 miles) and more than 1,800,000 structures worldwide, making GeoDigital the leader for corridor mapping in North America. 

The Powel team will form a new software and analytics division, GeoDigital Solutions, Inc. The division will be responsible for software development and the integration of complementary technologies into turnkey enterprise solutions for utilities and other asset intensive industries including rail, oil and gas, transportation, and telecommunications.
 

"WorkStudio, with its market leading stakeout field design management capabilities, represents the unifying system technology that our customers have been asking for," said GeoDigital president and CEO Alastair N. Jenkins, in explaining the rationale for the acquisition. "This acquisition brings us an unrivalled capability and portfolio to cost-effectively transform data collected from our leading edge services into actionable, money saving solutions for our customers. WorkStudio has been designed from the ground up for distributed linear asset environments and utility design and vegetation management functions, but we also see immense opportunity in other industries with heavy asset management and right-of-way maintenance needs."
 

GeoDigital integrates the world's most advanced imaging and data acquisition technologies to perform airborne and ground mapping services with LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) for applications that include vegetation management and line rating & clearance analysis. Powel's applications, such as its leading StakeOut field design maintenance tools, are able to quickly format spatial data collected by the GeoDigital systems into highly detailed asset inventories for field maintenance planning, execution and regulatory compliance reporting.
 

The combined organization will employ about 250 people across Canada and the U.S. GeoDigital Solutions will maintain all current facilities, including the St. Paul, Minn., headquarters of Powel. All existing sales and support structures will remain and GeoDigital Solutions will support all existing Powel, Inc., products, customers and long term support commitments.