Monday, August 10. 2009

Quick: Move the Servers to Save on Taxes!

You can file this under "Geography Matters": cloud platform providers are getting savvy about chasing the best tax benefits. If they should end in one state, they can ship the servers to another with better incentives. To that end Microsoft is packing up the Windows Azure platform (Platform as a Service in cloud speak) and moving it out of Washington State since breaks on equipment are no longer available.

I guess Sun had it right when the started thinking about packaging computing power in shipping containers.

via Slashdot via reader Larry

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Microsoft at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

The State of GIS in NZ

"We’re definitely seeing an upsurge in implementations, but I think that the bulk of the demand for these applications is yet to come. When mainstream solution partners have fully adopted GIS solutions as part of their offering, I think we’ll see the market surge in this area."

That's the word from Kevin Ackhurst, managing director of Microsoft New Zealand in Reseller News article touting MapIt, the enterprise app introduced at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference and the ESRI International User Conference. As for the uptake of MapIt by developers? "Ackhurst won’t say which local developers, other than [ESRI NZ Distributor] Eagle, are developing on top of Mapit and won’t provide numbers, saying it’s 'commercially sensitive.'"

The last sentence of the article, which I believe is sourced to Gartner (and maybe this research note?), seems to need some corrections as MapInfo has not been mentioned thus far and one would be hard pressed to compare Bentley's Geographics to MapInfo's products or MapIt:

While Google Maps continues to dominate the consumer end of GIS, current commercial competitors for MapInfo include Bentley Systems’ GeoGraphics, Smallworld Spatial Intelligence, Spatial Insights’ TrendMap, alongside open source GIS systems such as GRASS and a vast range of free products indexed by organisations such as OpenSourceGIS.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in ESRI, Microsoft at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |