#ESRIUC: Listening to Attendees and Walking the Exhibit Floor

Several people noted to me that the exhibit hall was not crowded. By that they meant there was a lot of open space. I have to agree - there was a lot of “booth art” - giant physical features built out of tinker toy that were perhaps aimed at filling space. I also learned from one vendor that ESRI provided the booth graphics for the small booths in the sustainability area. So, I read that as: exhibitors are down this year. And, exhibitors have changed places. Who are the two (only two) platinum sponsors? Trimble and Javad, both essentially, surveying hardware companies.

Several attendees shared that they expected attendance to be down this year. So did I. We were all wrong - attendance is at a record high, apparently. Why? I got two sorts of answers to that question:

(1) With the down economy, tech is the place to invest to lower costs and increase profits
(2) Folks who did not attend last year saved their pennies to come this year (or they are here on grant money)

Several folks piped up about the plenary session. While most were “ok” with the morning session (demos of ArcGIS 10 for the most part), more than one person wondered about the logic of giving out the Nat Geo Awards at the ESRI event. Why was it not at the Nat Geo event, they asked? Others did not feel the 19.20.21 project was truly enlightening or inspiring and ran on too long.

Walking the floor I checked in with a few of the small vendors:

ADCi was all smiles after its announcement (press release) this week that AccuWeather is using its maps across its offerings. There had been a relationship there in the past, but it expanded considerably. I think it’s a really good sign for the data business that there are (still!) a variety of providers at different price points. BTW, I noticed the ADCi logo on Accuweather last week as it’s my preferred weather source (it came out of Penn State, school of 1 in 4 weather people in the U.S.).

I said hello to CoreLogic and it was a good thing since I got a refresher on the fact that its the name of the recently spun out “geo” properties of First American. I’d forgotten that. BTW, CoreLogic was one of the names of the companies that First American acquired in its geo-buying spree.

Remember Archibus? They were one of the first CAFM (computer assisted facilities management) companies. Their app was built on AutoCAD. Now, they are moving to realm of GIS by “updating” their data store to support both access from Archibus and ESRI clients. That’d been in discussion for some time but now all the pieces are in place. Of significance to many who have tried to bridge that gap? A single database means data is always up to date - and not a static conversion that needs to be run each time there is a change.

I also noted a few tables of print publications laying on tables in booth on the show floor. It seems that Asia is still print focused and the publications are doing ok. I note that here in the U.S. the majority of print publications in the geospace are surveying ones. Their number matches that of imaging and GIS publications combined still in print here in the U.S. by my count.