Corporate History

Orbit GeoSpatial Technologies is an independent family business. Today, management is executed by Herman Bonne, Johan Bonne and Peter Bonne, assisted by engineers in software development, photogrammetric engineering, surveying, services, education.

Johan Bonne (CEO) leads the photogrammetry and research departments
Herman Bonne (CFO) heads the juridical, HR and account units
Peter Bonne is VP Business Development, Product and MarCom manager

Founder

Orbit GeoSpatial Technologies is founded by Walter Bonne (1925-1998) as Eurotronics NV. Born in Ghent, Belgium 1925, a technical education tought him mechanical and optical design. In his first job, he learned about surveying and gained great interest in this field. He studied for surveyor in his spare time, and by 1953 went to africa for a career as surveyor. There, being employed by a large road & rail development company, he learned about photogrammetry and immediately understood the vast impact of such technique. Back in Europe, he founded his own company, and got the degree of photogrammetric engineering at the ITC, Delft, Netherlands. He continued to give classes in that same school until 1969.

In 1962, he founded Aero Survey. With Aero Survey, he was one of the pioneers in independent photogrammetric map production. In 1971, he realised a national coverage of Belgium by orthophoto's, at that time a unique achievement.

Being skilled in mechanical design, optics, surveying and photogrammetric engineering, he concluded that with the upcoming of computers many items in the photogrammetric production process could be improved. He undertook studies in electronics, founded Eurotronics, and started research and development. By 1978, hardware and software were built to automate the photogrammetric production process, and eliminate all manual phases : data captation, data processing, interactive correction and automatic plotting was realised.

From that moment on, the development of software for map production took it's own way. By the mid 80's, the 'Mercator' system was sold throughout Europe and South-America, providing many companies with specialised software for large scale mapping production.

In the 90's, the hardware development again gained momentum which has resulted in the realisation of the WB2000 Photogrammetric Production unit. It is fair to say this unique instrument, which combines precise mechanics and optics with electronics and GIS software, has been developed by a single man, assisted by his sons over the last years.