I stand corrected Mr. Cole, only somewhat however. I am keenly aware of the
beyondgeo.com service and have tracked that for some time. I have visited
the site several times and some of the demo sites. I cannot argue with your
assertion that the service is profitable, I accept your position on that.
However, it is my opinion that this service, along with others like MapCity,
Xmarc, Mapquest.com, etc. are really designed for a more consumer-oriented
market. I realize that a big market is also the various government sectors,
some are listed on beyondgeo.com as well. This is a great fit for the ASP
model for GIS, but as you said, beyondgeo.com is not an enterprise GIS, so
then what is it ? I have no doubt your clients are pleased and visitors to
the site are happy with what they can use, but can it really be considered a
geographic information system? Perhaps we need to alter the GIS paradigm to
do so, which I would certainly not oppose, but this service, and others, is
not something that can or should be substituted for ArcInfo, ArcView,
FRAMME, MGE, etc.
Many would argue that serving those applications over IP is not possible,
practical or cost-effective, and that is where my point is made. Sure, it
may not be with licensing models that are suited to shipping CDs +30% per
annum for "support", but it is entirely possible. In addition, such a "true
GIS ASP" would offer users the ability to conduct business as usual, and
shift the burden to maintaining versioning, provisioning, licensing,
up-time, archive, backup, etc. to an ASP that focuses on being an ASP, not a
service or product company that decides to offer ASP services as another
business unit. An Ovum report a couple years ago discussed this whole model
and pointed out that ISVs will be tempted to enter the market, and this was
not in the best interest for the ISV, the business model or the consumer
base at large (both business and general consumers). Ask yourself, why is
there not an ASP providing a neutral ground for customers to sign-up, select
the solution that best meets their business needs and then pay a published
fee for their account ? For example, an electric utility might want to
build their enterprise GIS in Intergraph FRAMME with Oracle, use GDT
landbase for addressing and engineering, IKONOS images from Space Imaging,
and DEMs from Land Info to consolidate and build a powerful, corporate-wide
system that integrates with their ERP, CRM, WOM, CIS, etc. etc. All for less
per person, per transaction, and at a higher network up-time than they could
implement internally.
You can see why this does not yet exist right? ROM figures for the ASP just
to be able to offer a workable solution would be ~$1M. A majority of that
$1M would go to up-front purchases of software, because ISVs do not really
"support" the ASP model in that regard. Therefore, an ASP would have to
spend that money, and then the onus is on the ASP to sell services worth
$1M+ to make back those expenditures and general gross profit, which leaves
very little if any for net profit. This is only a simple example, but one
that illustrates what I am talking about, and the same concepts can be
extended down to "web-only" GIS products (things you could never buy on a CD
for the desktop). However, when a company decides to build their own GIS
product, with their own technology, what happens if that company, because of
such heavy capital to create a new product (when plenty exist already) that
the company is not financially viable in the long-term, and it is the
clients' data and business that is at risk. I don't know of any GIS ASP
that is a member of the ASP Industry Consortium, if there is, that will be a
step in the right direction.
Delivering spatial information in a GIS over IP is a great solution for
many, even a greater untapped market too, but the industry will not truly
get beyond first-adopters until more mainstream applications (yes, I am
talking about ArcView, ArcInfo, FRAMME, MGE, etc.) can be deployed
successfully in an ASP mode. The market is there, but at this point it does
not financial sense to implement. I hope that this change and the first and
second tier GIS ISVs are the ones who need to take that lead.
Best Regards,
Anthony
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Cole [mailto:jeff.cole@bluemarblegeo.com\
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2002 11:02 AM
To: ajq3@spatialnetworks.com
Cc: gislist@geocomm.com
Subject: re[2\: GISList: Manifold 5 IMS or GeoMicro's AltaMap Server
Anthony,
I'm the president/founder of Blue Marble Geographics. You may want to
consider including BeyondGeo in your knowledge-base of what's going on
within the IMS/ASP marketplace.
BeyondGeo (http://www.beyondgeo.com) is a service that is a very simple,
common-sense, and extremely affordable means for organizations to publish
their GIS projects online. BeyondGeo has b
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