Say Hello to Planet Insights Platform

The global Planet community gathered to explore how Earth data, analytics, and powerful tools can be used to create insights that characterize our changing physical Earth.

On April 11, 2024, Planet’s ecosystem of customers, prospective customers, partners, and employees came together online for a virtual launch of Planet Insights Platform, featuring presentations and demos from the Planet executives and the Product teams who are bringing the platform to life.

Planet co-founder and CEO Will Marshall kicked off the event with a big thanks to our global community of customers and partners who are innovating every day with Planet. This community is at the nexus of many challenges our society faces: peace and security, sustainability, and digitization; all of which need a more streamlined process to look broader in area, look backward in time, look closer with high–resolution imagery, and look deeper with analytics.

“You can think of Planet Insights Platform as your central hub for a vast array of data and tools that can provide new capabilities, create new insights, and build innovative products. [It] is the all-in-one place where you can achieve multidimensional Earth insights.”

Paving a Better Path to Broad Area Management

Today, organizations face significant pressures to reduce risk, remain compliant, and stay competitive in a time of rapid global change. Making sense and taking action in the face of global challenges requires information that reveals what is happening now, what happened in the past, what happened thousands of miles away, and what may happen in the future.

“These are tricky challenges to solve when narrowly defined, but even more complex to manage when the scope is global and change is frequent. The potential for blindspots multiplies,” said Donna Prlich, Chief Marketing Officer at Planet. “We believe our job is to remove those blindspots and give you insights that are multi-dimensional.”

She then explained how Planet Insights Platform gives organizations the ability to look more broadly, backward, closer, and deeper — to better inform decisions and manage risk. These are the core superpowers behind broad area management.

What to Expect From the Planet Insights Platform: Easier, Faster, and More Cost-Effective Insights

Troy Toman, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Planet, explained that the goal of the platform is to make it easier, faster, and more cost-effective to get information in one place.

“Planet Insights Platform unifies our core offerings into a single experience for our customers and partners, helping them embed Earth data and analytics into their workflows to become more productive and efficient.”

Some of these new and improved capabilities include:

• A unified account experience across Planet and Sentinel Hub
  
• Enhanced analysis-ready PlanetScope data
  
• Updated global Road and Building Change Detection
  
• New and improved Planetary Variables
  
• New time series and statistical analysis

Additional details on specific changes can be found in the announcement blog. 

Toman explained how the Platform is designed to address many hurdles that traditionally come with using Earth observation (EO) data — like insufficient image resolution and cadence, and cumbersome dataset formatting and application switching — and make it easier to find that “needle in the haystack.” 

He shared examples showcasing how three very different users — an analyst, a scientist, and a software developer — “may become more productive and context-aware when they have the right data, the right tools in one place, and better ways to share what they learn with people who might not be experts in geospatial or remote sensing.”

Jump Inside Planet Insights Platform: Three Demos

Planet experts then showcased what’s possible with Planet Insights Platform through a series of demos.

• Accessible APIs: Caroline Biermann, Director of Product for the Customer Platform, showed how the platform can help users more easily see change and manage broad areas with reliable data, scalable analytics, and accessible APIs. 
  

• Time-series analysis: Nasim Farsinia, Director of Product for Customer Growth at Planet, showed how the platform makes it easy to leverage Analysis-Ready PlanetScope and Planetary Variables data for accurate time-series analysis.
  
  
• Change detection: Justin Davis, Senior Product Manager for Applied Machine Learning at Planet, highlighted the platform’s Analytics Feeds, and Road and Building Detection tools. He explains how to leverage PlanetScope to produce change detection and manage large volumes of data using ML and AI.

Monitor. Identify. Analyze: A Platform for All Users

Here are a few questions we’ve received from customers, about Planet Insights Platform.

• How can universities and social impact organizations work with Planet to expand access to the data and analytics to organizations that face significant resource constraints? 
  
  Education and Research users can access the Planet Insights Platform for free! First, apply to our Basic Education and Research Program! Once you have an account, you can learn how to get started with Planet Insights Platform. Look for the Planet Open Data Sandbox.
  
  
• How will the new platform be for conventional users of the previous Sentinel Hub? (How easy/hard would the learning curve be?)
  
  Easy. Planet Insights Platform carries over a similar user experience as EO Browser in Sentinel Hub — the login is just unified.
  
  By consolidating the datasets and tools into one Platform, customers no longer have  to spend time managing multiple systems. Whether you are new to Planet or an advanced user, our goal is that you will be able to navigate the platform easily and derive meaningful insights from the data. We will provide you with a wide range of enterprise support and services, including trainings and online resources to maximize the value of the Platform. 
  
  
• How far back does your imaging data go?
  
  Planet Insights Platform has a 7+ year archive of near-daily data. This dataset can help users understand unforeseen events or establish baselines of activity and is a fundamental part of our unique broad area management offering.
  

Learn More About Planet Insights Platform

Will Marshall closed out the event by inviting attendees to join us at one of our Planet On The Road events in Berlin, Washington D.C., and Colombia this year. “These are one-day events across the globe where you’ll learn more about how our customers and partners are leveraging Planet Insights Platform, and hear about new product releases that will continue to make it easier for you to get insights and take action,” said Will.

Interested in learning more about what’s possible with Planet Insights Platform? Watch the full virtual event on-demand.

Or, register for our upcoming webinar, Improving Program and Policy Effectiveness With Scalable Earth Observation Insights (AMER time zone, EMEA time zone) — we’ll explore how Planet Insights Platform supports key policy issues, incluing hazard mitigation, resource management, and permitting and enforcement.

Already a Planet customer? Get started with Planet Insights Platform or join the Sentinel Hub forum on Planet Community to connect, ask questions, view product announcements, and learn more.