Digital Earth Weblog

The “enterprise GIS” session after lunch was mixed bag. Instead of going to the final session, which was basically ESRI Australia doing their thing, I spoke with a few of the vendors at their booths. Interestingly, of the four presentations given in the afternoon session the two most informative were from ESRI business partners IBM and Information Builders, not ESRI clients.

Kym Farnick from IBM actually gave definitions of “service” and “service oriented architecture” that mere mortals could understand. He did a good job of making the whole web services stack understandable, and didn’t harp on about IBM products.

One telling point in the IBM presentation was where ESRI tools fit into the IBM web services stack. It is a very small component of the overall stack. The implication was that ESRI plugs into IBM, not the other way around. That certainly makes sense from a business IT perspective, and ESRI have stated their desire to own the geospatial block in the SOA diagram.

However, in my view ESRI Australia’s communication of what they think SOA is, and how their products fit into it, left a lot to be desired. I’m sure there were a lot of people in the audience who didn’t have a clue what it was all about. I certainly didn’t get a good picture of what they are doing.

Bob Hazelton, from Information Builders, did a good job of showing how disparate information sources can be leveraged and turned into web services without writing code. He had some interesting examples of how adding a geospatial component to business intelligence applications has achieved significant results in the US. The classic “build vs. buy” decision hasn’t gone away, it has just moved up the stack.

None of the examples were Australian, although IBM have been doing something at the NSW Dept of Lands. It seems we’re a bit behind the curve on the use of web services in Australia. Perhaps we don’t have environments of the scale that justifies the use of SOA approaches.

On the whole the audience has been quite passive. Only one presenter has offered any “contructive criticism”. No questions have come from the audience. It’s quite weird, well, to me anyway. Sort of like an audience watching a TV show.

On blogging, I’ve not noticed anyone else tapping away on a laptop.