What is “slow” is the implementation of their use by most applications. Instead of creating image tile pyramids on the client side, or grabbing vectors by tile areas, most applications repeatedly ask for the same data over and over. Of course that implementation is slow.

I’m curious if the Navy uses CAC cards and requires client certificates for all web services like the USAF. If they do, they can’t use ESRI’s OGC services with it. Not only does 9.3 not allow you to select “use IE settings” to get past a base firewall, it still does not support client certificates making it totally useless. Something ESRI doesn’t seem interesting in fixing, since a request to do so has been in for over a year.

“We can’t accept the increasing costs of maintaining our present-day capabilities,” Edwards said. “In the civilian marketplace, it’s just the opposite. Some private-sector concerns are cutting their costs by 90 percent while expanding their performance.”

We will all interpret that differently, but one thing it clearly indicates is a tremendously strong focus on cutting costs. Of course, interoperability and eliminating stovepipes (which often mean that redundant data is being stored and served) is part of cutting costs. However, I can’t believe that the Admiral’s statements don’t also indicate a belief that there are products out that perform better at a much lower cost than what the Navy is using now.

Again, I’m not saying the Navy is going to replace all of it’s ESRI products tomorrow. In the end, no one knows to what degree, or what pace, they will incorporate Open Source or lower-cost alternatives. However, the Admiral’s statements, along with the increasing viability of Open Source tools (USGS, for example, has an aerial imagery WMS feed that (I think) is MapServer based) indicate to me that he is looking to replace some expensive pieces of the puzzle with less expensive pieces.

I agree that it’s not an easy thing to do but I also agree with James’ last comment that this speaks more to interop.

I find it interesting that this came from the deputy CNO for communications. I just wouldn’t read this as any major shift by the Navy toward open-source.

The Navy’s decision was informed by a combination of motivations, including the desire to provide the latest capabilities to warfighters and control the costs of its information technology operations (emphasis mine), he added.

“We can’t accept the increasing costs of maintaining our present-day capabilities,” Edwards said.

While it’s true that ESRI’s products can serve data in open formats such as WMS, moving to those formats opens the playing field to a much wider variety of products.