Solution Orientation to #ESRIUC Exhibit Floor

My general impression of the Esri UC exhibit floor was that the objective was not only to provide a typical exhibit hall but to showcase specific workflows such as, Public Safety, Defense and GEOINT, Environment and Climate Change. There were large "pavilion’s" set aside for each and although Esri has attempted this in the past, I thought they made more of an effort to differentiate these areas. I sat in on two demos one each in public safety and GEOINT.

The public safety demo was for the Port of Los Angeles and the solution provider was NICE Systems, a first time exhibitor on the show floor. If you are not familiar with NICE, an Israeli-based company, their specialty is building solutions for situation awareness and giving the users a common operational picture. Their demo of the NICE Situator, a solution derived from the recent acquisition of Orsus Situation Management, was slick in that they didn’t talk much about GIS but focused on the network of location-based alerts from video camera’s and triggers associated with secure doors and other areas that would be displayed on one of three monitors. You can get a good feeling for their approach with one of their online demos.

The second demo was provided by NAVTEQ for the GEOINT pavilion and illustrated the "sandbox" approach that Esri is developing to bring in several business partners to solve a particular problem. The demo provided several military scenarios whereby key environment type threats for land, sea, or air were simulated in addition to more specific threats such as for convoy routing or insurgent tracking (see the graphic at right; click for larger image.) What I appreciated about this demo is that its an attempt to get beyond products and talk more about solutions and while the underlying platform was ArcGIS Explorer a customized ribbon interface was developed to give the feeling of a complete system.