There’s an App for That: Building an End-to-End Drone Solution

As the industry grows and more businesses realize the benefit of drone technology, successful professional operators and enterprises are scaling operations – and that’s not always easy. Expanding an enterprise level drone program means meeting high standards for operations and demonstrating increased value to the bottom line. There are a lot of elements to a drone mission: from flight planning to client presentation and fleet management, with all of the data in between.

Scaling operations successfully means developing a complete system that allows businesses to handle operational requirements, tailor their output for specific industries, and maximize the value for customers and stakeholders.  Since enterprise customers each have unique needs, a one size fits all solution just doesn’t exist.

Creating a custom solution is easier than you might think.  The perfect end result of every drone mission is usable, actionable data – and thousands of businesses use the industry leading DroneDeploy platform to get there.  With DroneDeploy as the cloud-based drone data platform of choice, the hundreds of options available in the DroneDeploy App Market provide abundant alternatives to cover the rest of the process and create the perfect custom solution for any business.

“Drones are tools that need to be justified by ROI, and software services play a significant role in providing the final data deliverables companies need to drive value,” says DroneDeploy’s Ian Smith, the App Market’s Business Development Manager. “To date, there has not been an end-to-end solution for companies that want to scale drone operations across their organization. The DroneDeploy App Market solves this problem and puts a curated collection of best-in-class software solutions right at our customers’ fingertips. In many cases, the only thing left to do is click a button and receive results.”

Drone operators and program managers can put together a complete solution that starts with airspace intelligence from industry leaders like Airmap , pre-flight checklists like these from Flyte, and precision insurance from Verifly.  Flight planning gets easier with tools that range from overlap optimizers, field boundary imports, or integration of specialized sensors.

There are tools available to give businesses the edge and increase the ROI of a drone program in specific industries, like agriculture or roofing.  Apps to enhance the value of your data – like crop counting solutions from Birds.ai or Agremo (AgriSens), EZRoof to enhance information for building inspections, or GCP Volume Analysis for stockpile measurement – take actionable information to the next level, whatever your vertical.  Apps that handle export of data and integration with other systems, like JohnDeere in agriculture or AutoDesk in engineering, enhance the value of drone data even further.  And a wide selection of apps that handle operations –flight logging, fleet maintenance, and data sharing and delivery – help businesses handle the administration of a drone program.

As the adoption of drone technology expands across verticals, the drones themselves are only one small part of the program.  Software platforms will use the power of drones to deliver even more value to customers and pilots.

“2017 will be the biggest year for the commercial drone industry to date,” says Mike Winn, CEO and Co-Founder of DroneDeploy. “We can expect to see a dramatic shift in operations as larger companies invest in drone technology and the drone ecosystem blossoms with the introduction of key new software partners.”