OZRI 2005 Day One, Morning
OZRI 2005 is smaller than I expected. There are only about 300 people here. Still, it was good to see a lot of familiar faces.
The presentations from the morning session covered a lot of ground. Brett Bundock (CEO ESRI Australia) showed some interesting statistics in general industry trends. Virtual Earth, Google Earth, and open source software were all mentioned briefly, as was service oriented architecture (often).
The statistics were sourced from various locations (mostly US-centric). One interesting statistic on use of the Internet was that 84% of people use search engines to find information. No surprises there, but apparently the same percentage of people are searching for locations and driving directions.
Service oriented architecture: SOA got mentioned quite a bit and several of the case studies, but no solid definition of this term was given. Web services are rightly seen as the mechanism that will make spatial applications part of mainstream IT. Buzzwords like “Orchestration” and “Enterprise Services Bus” were also mentioned. This reflects ESRI’s push into mainstream IT (more on that later).
Web services: Web services seem to be a coming to the fore in the enterprise space. However, several presentations this morning showed that there is still a teminology issue that is confusing that conversation. There are the web services that are “software systems designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network”, and there are web services that are “services delivered to the user community over the Web”. With all the talk about portals this morning I’m sure that the web services message was not clear.
Open source software: Apparently Gartner is predicting that open source software will not exceed 10% penetration in for Global 2000 (I didn’t get what period that coveed). The important point that ESRI Australia chose to make from that was that revenue opportunities are shifting from licences to services. Pay per use models are becoming more appealing, and web services can play a part in that.
Case studies: Four presentations were case studies highlighting business benefits, all using ESRI software, of course. Some good work has been done.
Unfortunately, Jack Dangermond has been delayed and will not be here until tomorrow. Oh, and no mention of ArcGIS Explorer yet. I assume that has been saved for Jack.