Comments on: How can geospatial solutions capture more of the IT budget?

By: How can geospatial solutions capture more of the IT budget | Uniform Stores

How can geospatial solutions capture more of the IT budget | Uniform Stores — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:50:56 +0000

[...] How can geospatial solutions capture more of the IT budget Posted by root 11 minutes ago (http://vector1media.com) Accelerated application development thanks for the comment the title may have sounded greedy but the intent was powered by wordpress Discuss | Bury | News | How can geospatial solutions capture more of the IT budget [...]

By: Julia

Julia — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:45:51 +0000

I agree with Shawn – proprietary, commercial APIs are a vendor stack trap and getting completely locked into those should be avoided. You can still use commercial products, but still mix and match as needed. For example, if you use the AGS javascript API, you can only include services from AGS, AGS Online, Google Maps or MS Virtual Earth. You could not include OGC WMS services from other servers, so there no true interoperability, except with the vendor’s two big business partners. But, if you use an open client interface instead, such as Open Layers, MapFish or several others, you have the ability to combine data from many other open source and/or commercial map servers that support the OGC interoperability protocols, and still be able use your own map services from AGS and the other commercial APIs…

By: Matt Ball

Matt Ball — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:05:53 +0000

Thanks for the comment. The title may have sounded greedy, but the intent was to work on demonstrating value and offering lower cost solutions with high impact.

By: Shawn Owston

Shawn Owston — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:06:16 +0000

Shouldn’t the title be “How can geospatial solutions maintain/reduce an IT budget”?? Minimizing IT budgets and receiving ROI on investment and minimizing the custom development work and proprietary interfaces required to integrate geospatial technologies into business systems is the demand in the marketspace. Any talk of increasing any IT budget makes decision makers and accountants cringe.

I’m a big fan of REST, but the OGC SOAP services and the interoperability they provide creates a much higher ROI than investing into yet another proprietary client interface. Security and interoperability are highly weighed by IT stakeholders as well where REST still needs some work and standardization.

Good article although.