GEOINT 2025 | Broadcom - Burt Wagner

Adam Simmons of Project Geospatial speaks with Burt Wagner, a Data Architect at Broadcom, during the GEOINT 2025 Symposium. Burt, with 25 years supporting the US intelligence community and federal law enforcement, discusses Broadcom's lesser-known big data solutions. While Broadcom is widely known for semiconductors and acquiring VMware, Burt highlights their significant data products, including Gemfire and Greenplum databases. He explains how Greenplum, based on PostgreSQL, provides massive scalability (up to tens of petabytes) for analyzing geospatial data, overcoming PostgreSQL's limitations. The conversation also covers Broadcom's Unified Data Management (UDM) solution, which includes capabilities for crossing network security boundaries and operating in environments with denied, delayed, intermittent, and latent communications. UDM facilitates bringing edge data centrally for detailed analysis and building AI/ML models that can then be exported for use on small edge devices.

Highlights

• Burt Wagner, a Data Architect with 25 years supporting the US intelligence community, discusses Broadcom's big data solutions.

• Broadcom is a large corporation known for semiconductors and its recent acquisition of VMware.

• Broadcom offers significant data products, including Gemfire and Greenplum databases, designed for large-scale analytics.

• Greenplum is a scale-out database based on open source PostgreSQL, engineered for massive parallel processing and petabyte-scale data, unlike traditional PostgreSQL which struggles beyond 5-10 TB.

• Greenplum natively supports PostGIS, allowing vast amounts of GIS data to be managed at scale.

• Broadcom's Unified Data Management (UDM) solution integrates tools to operate across different network security levels and in D-DIL (denied, delayed, intermittent, latent) environments.

• UDM supports bringing edge data for central analysis, AI/ML model building, and exporting small models for edge deployment.