Anthony,
You lost me. what's the talk of business models? The thread is aimed (I=20
thought) at training programs in Africa (as proxy for all developing=20
regions I would think). These people need software that is easy to get=20
hold of, install and use. My assumptions there, were zero-software-cost=20
solutions. Let the aid money pay for human trainers to help them out....not=
=20
for software licenses.
Regarding donations, yes, ESRI, Intergraph and others routinely donate=20
software to this sort of cause.
Mike
At 20:20 21/01/2005, Anthony Quartararo wrote:
>Frank, Mike, et al,
>
>Indeed, access to broadband is a fatal flaw for this business model for
>developing communities. However, it is much less fatal than it may
>initially appear. Bandwidth and access to bandwidth does, despite the
>wholesale vaporization of the telecom industry, continue to move forward.
>More fiber landings continue to be made [at least 30+ on the African
>continent], microwave, broadband Wi-Fi [WiMAX] and even broadband satellite
>make steady progress, even in developing communities. The flaw is in
>getting more people more access, sooner rather than later, not anything
>implicitly wrong with the business model itself.
>
>Further complicating the struggling spatial ASP model is the
>counterintuitive licensing and technical deployment models that the major
>GIS software vendors impose upon potential consumers / solution providers=
of
>spatial ASP services. Take for example Malaysia, India and South Korea, 3
>of the most heavily penetrated broadband markets and very technically
>advanced communities (GIS/IT communities), if access to broadband internet
>was truly a limiting factor, we would conclude that these 3 communities
>would be stampeding to implement spatial ASP solutions and ditching the
>desktop/LAN-enterprise GIS, etc. They are not. This is due to unnecessary
>and counterproductive software (GIS, RDBMS & 3rd party products) and data
>products licensing restrictions [not to mention some governmental
>bureaucratic chicken-littles] preventing the implementation of more useful=
&
>effective solutions.
>
>Take the CRM market as a reasonable, if not limited technical proxy: for
>years SAP, Oracle, Siebel and others dominated the market, and their=
systems
>implementation [technical complexity] & costs made a modest enterprise-GIS
>look like "dollar-store" material. Along comes Salesforce.com (and some
>others) that moved the entire CRM model to an ASP. At present,
>salesforce.com has over 214,000 paying users from 13,300 customers [an
>average of 16 users per customer btw], and each of those users pay a=
minimum
>of $65 per month [for those keeping score at home, that's $14,000,000 per
>month in sales, minimum]. This is just one CRM ASP provider too. The=
point
>being, there was a latent demand that was being overlooked by the big CRM
>vendors, and that latent demand turned into a complete paradigm shift for
>the CRM industry [Seibel, ACT!, etc. all moved to the ASP model AFTER
>salesforce.com]. The same needs to happen in our industry. There is such=
an
>incredible latent demand in the developing world, not to mention a sizable
>market in the developed world, for REAL spatial ASP solutions, it confounds
>me that no one has really capitalized on it yet. [the numbers are very
>compelling]
>
>True, right now, as I write this response, the best solution may be handing
>a set of CDs to someone in a developing community, but that process is rife
>with fatal flaws as well, and is a dying business model. The longer
>organizations subscribe to it, the longer it will persist [to the detriment
>of the users, the consumers and the industry as a whole]. I do appreciate
>the reality-check however. Thanks.
>
>Anthony
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Frank Warmerdam [mailto:fwarmerdam@gmail.com]
>Sent: Friday, January 21, 2005 12:53 PM
>To: Anthony Quartararo
>Cc: gislist@lists.geocomm.com
>Subject: Re: [gislist] GIS software/hardware donations for 3rd World
>
>On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:18:09 -0500, Anthony Quartararo
><ajq3@spatialnetworks.com> wrote:
> > Rick,
> >
> > Why not approach the problem from a fresh perspective? I am speaking
> > of the as-of-yet unfulfilled spatial ASP business model.
>
>Anthony,
>
>I think an ASP model for some sorts of mapping and spatial data analysis
>could be valuable, but my understanding is that dependable high speed
>network access is a big challenge in much of Africa.
>An ASP model might work well for some federal employees or major
>universities, but that once you get out into field offices internet access
>drops off dramatically.
>
>Earlier this week I spoke wi
|
