MapBrief™

In the aftermath of last week’s post describing how ESRI’s push into the Cloud will have a major impact on how third-party integrators and consultants will make money, there was some interesting back-channel conversation dealing with what exactly are the components of a geospatial business model and what they might look like in a more web-centric universe.

An under-appreciated aspect of the web mapping revolution has been the loss of user-intimacy with particular brands that very much holds sway in the desktop realm.  With traditional GIS being a somewhat complicated technology, getting anything done  requires a significant investment in learning a particular vendor’s desktop software package to the extent that the switching costs between ESRI, MapInfo, and Autodesk are quite high. On the web, where the ease of user experience trumps all (and Facebook, Angry Birds, et al, are a mere mouse-click away), non-professional users are largely unaware of the brands providing the experience–with the big fat exception of Google, particularly Google Earth.

On the web the goal is fast, intuitive, and accurate: the end user doesn’t care how you make it happen.

Open source geospatial software provides healthy building blocks to profitable business models in the web world

That’s why geospatial open source has shined during the web mapping revolution:  the ability to customize the end-user experience as needed using components such as GeoServer, MapServer, PostGIS, OpenLayers, etc. (often in hybrid settings alongside vendor-specific components).  A key enabler of the interoperability that fitting these pieces and parts together implies has been OGC open standards such as WMS, KML, etc.  As online maps evolve beyond being mere viewers, heavier analytic processing is happening on web servers, often via the OGC Web Processing Services (WPS) protocol.

Never heard of WPS?  This year’s FOSS4G conference in Denver will have over 20 sessions addressing the topic in some fashion or another.

And that speaks to the value of open source:  a bazaar of established proven technologies, new approaches to longstanding challenges, and edgy stuff that raise as many questions as answers. How do these different components can accomplish your clients’  business needs?  That’s where your experience and creativity comes into play.  Keeping with the food analogy, what’s on offer at this year’s FOSS4G conference in Denver are a full survey of quality ingredients and a wide variety of tasty dishes that we’re cooked up to solve specific problems.  Because open source isn’t created in a vacuum: folks go to the trouble because there’s a problem they want solved (thus minimizing those uncomfortable moments at every vendor conference where some ‘solution’ is being demo’d that bears zero relation to any actual workflow known to the audience).  To be sure, like any buffet you’ll run across items that will leave you wondering What was that? But isn’t that the creative process:  hits, misses, and stuff so out there you have to track creator down and ask “what were you thinking?”

And they’ll tell you; and give you a link to the source code.

Browse the program and ask yourself if there are enough nuggets there that warrant further investigation.  If you need a primer to get up to speed plus a brass-tacks discussion of how folks are making money with open source, check out our day-long introductory event with some of the geospatial industry’s heaviest hitters, which you can attend as a prelude to the main sessions or as a standalone event.

Either way, we’ll see you in Denver in September.

—Brian Timoney

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

The Cloud was supposed to be mostly hype, and the part that wasn’t had something to do with Google.  If this year’s ESRI Users’ Conference was overly focused on ArcGIS Online, you reasoned, it was merely the new shiny bauble in Redlands.  If its president seemed a little fixated on The Cloud, well, he’s an excitable guy eager to communicate his excitement about exciting things. But with the conference being the great venue to catch up with colleagues and clients  (not to mention the car-free nightlife), you told everyone it was a “good conference”: mostly meaning that San Diego is one of the few pleasant places left in America to spend a week in July.  Maybe after the conference you went on vacation to recover spend quality time with the family. Two weeks out of the office–you know how the game is played.

Let me bring you up to speed on what you missed while you were away: ESRI killed your business model.

See, you make your money as an “intergrator”: tweaking software, servers, and interfaces to meet end-user needs. Your bread and butter are the big government contracts: federal agencies (DoD and Homeland Security if you’re especially lucky) and some larger state projects.  Margins are nice, and they make for a comfortable office building in a suburban office park (see: Reston, VA).

Hyman Roth explains to Michael Corleone that "this is the business we've chosen": never personal, just business

First, during the UC, a press release dropped on a Lockheed/ESRI collaboration on web-based apps using ESRI’s cloud infrastructure aimed particularly at the DoD/Homeland Security sector. In and of itself, not red-flag worthy. But then this little gem dropped, detailing a USDA-wide implementation of ESRI’s cloud infrastructure. Read between the lines: ESRI is no longer content to merely have its software be a line-item in the large contracts: it’s selling its platform and all of the ancillary services around it, with “scalability” being code for “we plan on being the dominant provider for the largest clients.”  Think about this way:  ArcGIS Online means fewer ArcServer licenses for small- and medium-sized shops; direct-connect to spatial databases means a lot less use cases for ArcSDE (thank goodness).  That loss of revenue has to be made up somewhere, and Redlands has pushed its chips on the square marked “Cloud”.  See this as a page out of the IBM playbook where the real money is in high-margin services, with software merely being the means to that end.

So where does leave you, the ESRI Business Partner? You better have some serious stroke in your business domain (e.g. Lockheed), or have analytic “secret-sauce” services not easily replicated by ESRI. The “me-too” stuff and the marginally useful branded add-ons won’t be enough anymore in a world where ESRI is no longer shy about doing ESRI better than you do ESRI.

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But let’s stop being gloomy and address the situation in a proactive way, a forward-leaning posture if you will. Change doesn’t happen overnight, so I’d estimate you have about two years to figure out how you’re going to make money five years from now. If there was ever a time to engage in a little of that out-of-the-box thinking, now would be that time. Because you need ideas. If the phrases “Vice President”, “Strategic”, “Accounts”, “Marketing”, etc., appear anywhere on your business card, your company is looking to you to figure this one out. Lucky for you I can help out.  In mid-September, the brightest minds in geospatial will be gathering in Denver, Colorado discussing software and possibilities without the vendor pep rally vibe.

“Open source?  But there’s no business model there.”

Yeah, we knew you would say that. So we set up a special day-long event that is both an introduction to geospatial open source as well as a broad discussion of how people are making money integrating open source components. And then we take the discussion to a microbrewery.

Details here.

We realize it’s a busy world, so you can just pay for this one-day event, or add it on to a full-conference registration. If time is tight, my playbook would be to go to the one-day event on September 13th, and have your most trusted geek do the deep-dive sessions during the rest of the week. You’ll come away with a bunch of intriguing ideas; the rest is up to you.

Get with the program.

—Brian Timoney

Since the rise of “neo-geography” 5-6 years ago, there has been heavy deployment of the adjective “authoritative”, especially by vendors who serve traditional producers of geospatial data . Unimpeachable accuracy and the gravitas of expertise are what is being implied here, especially in contrast to the unruly new worlds of crowd-sourcing and mashups of heterogeneous information. But the problem is that professionals define authority in units of centimeters while users–aka the public–define authority very differently.

Authority? That’s your position in Google’s search results.

In the US, real estate sites dominate address search results with "authoritative" geo info nowhere to be found

And that’s where our friendly neighborhood realtor enters the story. With beaming faces on business cards and the unshakable faith that it’s always a great time to buy, realtors have figured out search engine optimization (SEO), much to the detriment of the geospatial industry.  Because at least here in the US, type in any residential address into a search engine, and you’ll be sifting through a blizzard of real estate results before you’ll uncover any links to authoritative content directly produced by geospatial professionals.  Of course we users of the web don’t “sift”: if it’s not on the top half of the first page of results, it’s dangerously close to being invisible.

A couple of years ago, Jason Birch of Nanaimo, BC blogged about making municipal data more user-friendly by optimizing its Google-ability.  He laid out the rationale for creating searchable sitemaps for GIS data so it could be discovered the way people are accustomed to finding other information: via the search engine.  With the ascendance of REST-ful architectures that enable access to individual spatial features as unique resources via a standard HTTP request, all of the ingredients seemed to be in place to make authoritative geo information easily discoverable.

But it hasn’t happened. Instead we get ever more complicated, er, “rich” web mapping portals with one way in, and icons normal users often find confusing. Let’s start prioritizing SEO for Geo with the premise that Google may be a person’s first stop when looking for information. Sitemaps for search engine indexing are not a complicated technology. We recently rolled out a small project for a municipality with limited web resources, with SEO, that has yielded decent results in the first few weeks.

There is a great quote from Bill Parcells who was fond of assessing his teams’ performances by saying “you are what your record says you are.”  As an industry we need to wake up to the fact that in web mapping we’re playing by the rules of the web where what you are is largely a function of your search engine ranking. If reaching the public with your information is indeed the goal, then measuring authority strictly in terms of spatial accuracy misses the point in an impatient world where accessibility and findability trumps all.

Just ask a realtor.

—Brian Timoney