30 September 2010
There is an interesting article summing up the recent Location Intelligence GeoCloud summit at which I was a guest speaker.
All the issues highlighted are indeed important and need to be dealt with to make a success of GIS as a Service, but I believe there was one overarching point that was missed by the vast majority presenters at the event: That is GIS as a Service has the capability to serve an entirely new audience with GIS functionality, above and beyond the existing market.
We should be thinking about how we create a GIS as a Service platform that supports altogether new applications that will service a much, much wider audience.
Yes, GIS as a Service will help existing users and niches to balance license and hardware costs, and improve the capabilities and reach of their existing and new GIS applications, but the big idea is much wider: At eSpatial we are building for a time when GIS and location intelligence become truly pervasive requirements. So rather than just replacing today’s client-server solutions, GIS-as-a-Service has the potential to offer a lot more customers, a lot more GIS.
Philip O’Doherty, CEO
