ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — IHS Inc. today announced that it has expanded its relationship with Valtus Imagery Services to provide direct online access to the company’s U.S. ortho-rectified imagery via IHS and 3rd party WMS-enabled applications, including IHS PETRA®. The enhanced product offering provides a real-world view of the field directly from the desktop.

“IHS has enjoyed a long-standing and successful relationship with Valtus in the Canadian energy sector, and we are excited to expand the offering of their scalable, high-resolution, true color photographic images into the U.S. E&P workflow,” said IHS Vice President Tim Hopkins. “Now American customers can receive the benefits that seamless integration of this imagery with other IHS E&P datasets has been providing to Canadian customers for many years.”

Valtus Ortho Imagery contains seamless, high-resolution, 0.5 metre (~20 inch) and 1 metre (~39 inch) true color ortho-rectified images that offer a detailed topographic understanding of an area of interest. Unlike other imagery providers, Valtus directly addresses the needs of the oil and gas business — acquiring imagery in more remote areas and continuing to expand coverage based on drilling needs. Valtus Ortho Imagery is fully rectified to the terrain surface model, giving the images a uniform scale to allow for accurate measurements, and the images are not subject to the same displacements – cloud cover, nadir angle, poor resolution – as typical surface imagery. The company’s imagery aids in play development, health and safety requirements and transportation and infrastructure issues relating to the oil and gas industry.

“We are both pleased and excited to be expanding our seven-year relationship with IHS through our efforts into the U.S. energy market”, said Valtus Vice President and General Manager Tim Crago. “Not only will this bring the best available imagery to those using the IHS PETRA application, but as with our existing business model in Canada, under the same imagery subscription users will be able to access the imagery in any of their other WMS enabled GIS applications. This new offering is being supported and delivered by Valtus’ renowned proprietary, best-in-class system.”