Comments on: The big picture of ArcGIS Server

By: Brian Flood

Brian Flood — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 21:29:11 +0000

for the foreseeable future, I think Cam W. has hit the nail on the head.

By: Cam W.

Cam W. — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:20:19 +0000

I just wanted to make a point about software costs. In my experience with large scale projects software costs don’t make up a large percentage of the total project cost. The fact that PostGIS / Geoserver / Mapserver (new acronym: PGGM) costs absolutely nothing has very little impact on the bottom line. What is far more critical is availability of required skill sets. Good SDE Admins with experience in large data volumes are tough to find, but I bet you could count the number of people with equivalent PostGIS experience on one hand. That is the real ESRI ‘lock in’. Add into the mix the new ArcSDE for workgroups, and the revised ArcServer lineup and it’s even harder to justify the move to different products. The only way any established company would change is if the other solution was technically superior… not just cheaper. As it stands right now while PostGIS is really good at maintaining simple geometry the fact is SDE is at least as good and offers a lot of other features users can grow into (images / grids / terrains / topology etc, etc). Of course if you don’t have any ESRI products & your looking at a relatively simple project a PGGM solution would make a lot of sense.

By: James Fee

James Fee — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 17:13:36 +0000

“ESRI shops will be very reluctant to move towards an open source solution, no matter the cost savings and benefits gained from moving towards open standards”

If ESRI is giving these shops access to open standards what is the loss? Consumers are pushing ESRI for this support and ESRI is delivering. There is nothing wrong using ESRI software on the back end if you can server up data that can be consumed by many users independent of ArcGIS. That is a huge deal IMO and one that ESRI users need to take advantage of.

If as av8tor mentions that one is “stuck” using ArcGIS, they now can interact with the community at large with ESRI’s support of many OGC standards. Is it perfect, not by any means. But now that the door is open, ESRI users need to push it wide open and let all the other open standards in.

The end user shouldn’t worry about what server software is being used. That is for us to argue on blogs. They just need web services they can consume on the clients of their choice.

By: av8tor

av8tor — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 17:06:11 +0000

Dylan, why should ESRI users think about moving to open source? Because it exists?

It will be a cold day in hell when our IT department allows us to install open source on our windows computers. I have to work within that framework, good or bad.

By: Dylan

Dylan — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 17:00:28 +0000

Yes, true indeed – ESRI shops will be very reluctant to move towards an open source solution, no matter the cost savings and benefits gained from moving towards open standards. However, I still believe that these days it is increasingly difficult to be “locked” into the ESRI product suite – considering the mass industry support for their own formats, the emergence of the OGC standards suite, and even ESRI’s own moves to read and write in more open formats.

But to your point, my thoughts are that the big picture for ESRI users is that they might think about slowly – as slowly as need be – think about moving some of their solutions to be PostGIS based with Mapserver or Geoserver or one of the many WMS/WFS servers acting as the streaming server. I do wonder about moving heavily analytical-based apps to use PostGIS – having only partially done this myself.

By: James Fee

James Fee — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:12:03 +0000

“Not to knock ArcGIS Server, as the new one looks very capable, but I would look elsewhere for my WMS/WFS/KML streaming needs.”

Unless of course you are locked into the ESRI suite. ArcGIS Server now allows those groups who could not run PostGIS/Geoserver/Mapserver publish data that the community can consumer, rather than just other ArcGIS clients. Lets not lose sight of the big picture here for ESRI users.

By: Dylan

Dylan — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:03:37 +0000

I’m going to chime in with my support for Tim’s aforementioned points. Using PostGIS, perhaps Geoserver, and some clever scripting, you can server up large quantities spatial data at near real-time temporal increments to various clients – GE in particular. And the cost is basically free.

Not to knock ArcGIS Server, as the new one looks very capable, but I would look elsewhere for my WMS/WFS/KML streaming needs.

By: avanwieren

avanwieren — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 13:32:49 +0000

I find this discussion intersting. I currently am working on a project contracting for the Center for Disease Control. To me, they have plenty of qualified GIS analysts, and the data for our project is of good quality. The problem I often see is a lack of knowledge about what can be done in spatial analysis regarding health. I have had to spend alot of time with our clients at the CDC explaining benificial spatial analysis and justifying how GIS could provide insights into the statistical data present.

As well, there is alot of overlap in CDC programs. The nature of funding tend to be a large source for this overlapping as well as a lack of clear defined requirements for these projects. Also, there are so many layers trying to determine who can provide and who has access to data.

Just thought I would put my three cents in.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 13:17:48 +0000

Oh, and sorry for double posting, I meant to address the point about the need for high quality data.
Trying to perform analysis or presenting statistics via GIS becomes incredibly difficult when there is compromised data, whether through carelessness, incompleteness or simply a lack of useable data itself. So much more could be done if everyone who partakes in data collection and organization, keeps GIS end users in mind when putting together packages.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 13:13:22 +0000

“the big problem in public health is not technical or cost, but awareness of GIS and the need for high quality data.”

Being a university summer student in a Public Health organization.. and constituting the entire GIS department, I can’t stress Declan’s point enough. At the start of this summer I put together a day long seminar for all the management here because people here were actually outsourcing basic cartography work, and simple geographical analysis. They had no idea what the “Geography Inspection Student” did, or how it could be important/relevant to public health.