Don’t Let “the cloud” Cloud Your Vision for Location Intelligent Apps

Seems like everyone is jumping on the band wagon with a cloud-based app for location intelligence (LI). Alteryx, PBBI, SpatialKey, Skygone, Esri. But what if we are digging the same whole that we had with desktop mapping? Back in the day, the desktop mappers at Blockbuster Video, Starbucks and Erie Insurance, just to name a few, were backroom, heads down, isolated GIS departments. "Make me a map!" was the cry from the marketing department! "Show me where to build," clamored the real estate VP.

That’s not the vision of the future we need to have now for LI cloud computing apps. We want to pick the app from the cloud and insert it into our cloud-based analytics solution. We’ve spent a decade making "on premise" applications interoperable with other IT solutions like business intelligence software. Let’s not make the mistake with SaaS solutions for location intelligence.

I see several BI solutions trying to make use of Google Maps as their "cloud" data source. And I see many GIS vendors trying to do the same. But what I don’t see are embedded apps from the GIS vendors that can be integrated with SaaS BI solutions.

I suggest reading this article entitled "Cloud will render BI stack irrelevant: SAP" which I don’t entirely agree with given that it’s an SAP point of view. But it will make you realize that cloud-based location intelligent apps need to fit into a cloud stack, not the other way around. "We won’t see customers moving in mass from on-premise to cloud," said Michael Pearson, president of Toronto-based SAP partner Contax Inc." Pearson sees it happening on an application or appliance basis, as it makes business sense to move a specific process or function to the cloud, according to the article.

GIS solution providers tried inserting so much functionality into desktop mapping apps, many of which were really in the domain of BI that it just confused users. What users really wanted were better BI tools that rendered maps so that they could see the spatial correlations of their data. So, should only certain applications move to the cloud and not complete LI solutions that are really just retreaded desktop mapping apps? In the cloud computing era, will history repeat itself for LI? And, what really is an LI stack in the cloud?