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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Subject: | Re: GISList: Information for a real neophyte |
| Date: |
08/28/2002 02:23:13 PM |
| From: |
David Nealey |
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Richard, the statement I believe is based on sales figures and licenses
sold. I have seen figures that state that there are 500,000 licenses of
ArcView in existence. The statement does not say that there 500,000
licenses of ArcView 8.x which should be the current benchmark or that
500,000 licenses have been sold since ArcView was first released. So it is
hard to say what it means.
I have never seen a statement saying how many ArcInfo licenses have been
sold. The problem here is that only ESRI can sell ArcInfo, Business
Partners cannot.
And I have never seen figures from Intergraph, Autodesk, or any of the other
companies stating how many licenses of their products they have sold. For
the public companies you may be able to get the information from their
Investor Services departments. For the private companies you could ask
their reps but I doubt that any of them will give you the numbers -- it is
proprietary information.
So how do you tell who is number 1, number 2, etc. Purchase a report from
Dataquest. This marketing company surveys the industry and goes behind
closed doors to gauge the industry. In previous reports Dataquest has
reported that ESRI is number one in software sales. Intergraph is usually
number one in total sales because of its hardware and software sales. Which
one is number one in terms of professional services, I don't know.
Who uses GIS software? I would say everyone from business people to
government to scientists (geologists, biologists, etc). Municipal and
state governments own a lot of ArcView and ArcInfo licenses. But
engineering firms also own a lot of these licenses as do colleges and
universities.
From my asking around, GeoMedia licenses are used mainly in the
transportation and utilities industries The reason is that many of these
agencies invested in Intergraph products in the early days and later
migrated their systems to a newer Intergraph technology.
From the name, I would also think that TransCad is targeted at the
transportation industry as well. I have no experience with the product and
have never seen a demo. And I have never seen a demo of Idrisi but I know
people who swear by it. These are mostly people from schools that have
strong raster/vector analysis courses like the University of Colorado.
Similarly I have never seen Maptitude or Manifold.
MapInfo as best I can I tell is targeted at the business community but some
of my scientist friends like it a lot. From what I have seen, MapInfo is
excellent for geostatistical analysis.
Autodesk Map should be strong in the engineering industry. Map adds GIS
functionality to AutoCAD and is less robust than Land Development Desktop.
Below is a matrix that shows how I would match the products to industries.
The values represent what I have seen at conferences such as URISA, GITA,
GIS in the Rockies, Mid-America GIS, and ESRI Users Conferences in the last
two-three years. The matrix also represents the frequency of products that
I have seen mentioned in Requests for Proposals and job ads.
Perhaps others can expand upon the matrix. Maybe someone can add public
safety, which I know ArcvIew/ArcInfo are strong, as well as GeoMedia. They
could also add info for disease tracking where ArcView/ArcInfo are strong.
Notice that I have not shown single/private users. Most of the people that
I know are local, state or federal government users. There could be
millions of single/private users out there using any of these products as
well as MapPoint -- I don't know.
Municipal State Federal Telcos
Water Transportation Universities Real Estate
Oil/Gas Eng.
ArcView Strong Strong Strong Strong
Strong Strong Strong Moderate
Strong Strong
ArcInfo Strong Strong Strong Strong
Strong Strong Strong ??
Strong Strong
GeoMedia Weak-Mod Mod Mod Strong ??
Strong Weak-Mod ?? ? ?
Map Mod Weak-Mod ?? Mod
?? Weak-Mod Weak ??
? Strong
Maptitude ?? ?? ??
?? ?? ?? ??
?? ? ?
Manifold ?? ?? ??
?? ?? ?? ??
?? ? ?
MapInfo Weak-Mod ?? ?? Weak-Mod
?? ?? ?? Strong
? ?
Question marks mean that I have no idea and won't venture to even guess.
The other values cannot be associated to a specific number of licenses
because I do not know that informa
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