I attended a one day conference hosted by ESRI. It was a large conference with approximately 400 people primarily from the Public Sector. ESRI is the leader in GIS (Geographic Information Systems) applications and technology. ESRI is embracing many of the trends I noticed at OpenWorld last month. Specifically, the trends include Social Media, Mobile Devices and the Cloud. ESRI hosts a site for sharing maps developedby GIS professionals. There are some interesting maps posted on the site including hiking trails, weather maps, zip codes and other useful information. The maps can be used and extended and re-posted. It is an interesting twist on the OpenSource concept. ESRI demonstrated continuing support for the major mobile devices; Windows 7 Phone (more on this in another post), Blackberry, Android and iPhone. The speaker noted that the mobile devices technology is experiencing an incredibly fast uptake.
One of the highlights of the afternoon was a demonstration of ESRI on the Amazon EC2 Cloud. It was amazing to see a server resource available in minutes. I am starting to get on-board with the technology.
We have a lot to do in order to get our GIS program fully running. I installed version 10 of the ArcGIS server last month. After speaking with several other participants, I need to set up a SQL Server database as well to perform the role of GeoDatabase. We are planning to use the ESRI software for threemain business needs; transportation analysis, student demographics and facility management. A secondary objective is to explore and stand up a Service Oriented Architecture between Oracle Applications and GIS. One good test case is the analysis of our staff and faculty based on location.
Comments