A €3.8 million project - supported by grant aid from PHARE - completed in under a year

In order to boost efficiency and promote a unified and coherent environmental and nature protection policy, the Romania's Ministry of Environment chose Bull to act as prime contractor for the implementation of its Geographic Information System (GIS). A central pillar of the country's environmental program, the GIS project will enable the Ministry to take environmental decisions based on field-consistent data. The system contains a huge volume of data related to environment protection, including topographical data, satellite imagery and digital elevation model, species distribution, protected areas, dump-sites, industrial areas, noise maps, etc. All data is available to local and central governmental bodies, as well as to citizens through a user-friendly Web portal.

"In Romania, or indeed any other EU Member State, the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) built as a result of a PHARE-funded project and successfully implemented by Bull is definitely one of the most advanced SDIs ever built in the environmental field. The project to create the Romanian environmental SDI is part of our program aimed at implementing the INSPIRE Directive ; one of the most recent and challenging EU Directives. So the fact that Bull managed to successfully deliver such a complex SDI on time has elevated Bull to one of leading companies in the EU capable of building such systems to meet the demands of implementing the INSPIRE Directive ," commented Iurie Maxim, Head of Biodiversity, Biosecurity and Environmental Protection Office within the Ministry of Environment.

"We are proud that the Romanian Ministry of the Environment chose Bull as its IT partner to implement such a highly sophisticated solution. Our ability to deliver innovative projects is proof once again of Bull's integration expertise when it comes to building robust and ready-to-use solutions." explained Luc Saint-Jeannet, Vice-President International Operations, Bull.

"For 15 years, Bull has been involved in a large number of modernization projects in Romania, as well as in other Eastern and Central European countries, to support their accession to the European Union. We enjoyed a double-digit growth rate last year and are expanding our workforce at our new head office. This pioneering GIS project has been enthusiastically supported by all of our teams," added Andrei Petrescu, General Manager of Bull Romania and Bulgaria.

The new system will benefit a wide range of organizations, including:

• The Ministry of Environment

• The National Agency for Protected Areas

• The National Agency for Environmental Protection

• 42 local environmental protection agencies, who will be responsible for keeping the data up to date

• Eight regional environmental protection agencies

• Five environmental research and development institutes: the National Meteorological Institute, the National Institute for Hydrology and Water Management, the National Institute for Environmental Research & Development, the National Institute for Marine Research and Development 'Grigore Antipa', and the Danube Delta National Institute for Research and Development. The five institutes will be the 'power users' of the GIS system, having access to data and virtualized applications through VPN channels.

A highly sophisticated project to implement the INSPIRE Directive

The scope of the program covers the entire IT infrastructure - both hardware and software- and the appropriate services necessary to build the geographical information system. The system is using data from SPOT images covering Romania and thematic maps. Bull implemented the whole IT infrastructure, now running since end November 2008.

The GIS system is based on leading software solutions including:

• A highly complex ESRI GIS software solution, among the biggest in Europe with the world leader ArcGIS Server Enterprise Advanced package and its extensions including Spatial Analyst, Enterprise 3D, Image Server....

• The Microsoft SQL Server database running on a 4 quad-processor Bull NovaScale cluster

• The ERDAS solution for complex geographic imaging processing

• The Definiens E-Cognition solution, a sophisticated grid software package which recognizes different entities on images based on image fragmentation algorithms

• SAS Enterprise Business Intelligence software for reporting (including SAS Web OLAP Viewer, used to interactively analyze the spatial data)

• Citrix Xenapp for virtualization of some applications to be used remotely

• Backup and recovery software

The hardware architecture deployed within the Ministry's core Data Center includes: 12 quad-processor Bull NovaScale servers, 8 dual-processor Bull NovaScale servers, Bull StoreWay storage solutions and a complete Cisco network infrastructure.

The services delivered by Bull encompass:

• Integration of all software, to provide the Ministry with a turnkey solution

• Installation of Cisco networking and security equipments

• Around 50 training sessions held across the country

• A five-year program of software upgrades and maintenance.

The project was implemented by Bull between January and November 2008.