Four Drivers for the Geocloud #GWF

Steve Hagan, VP of Development, Server Technology, Oracle, discussed platforms issues for the development of geocloud at the Geospatial World Forum in Hyderabad. He identified four global drivers for geospatial cloud computing:

• Big data - terabytes and petabytes of data
  • Sensors, RFID, LiDAR, etc.
• Big Software
  • Spatially enable all applications: ERP, CRM, BI
• Real time Analytics
  • Big value from fastest response – streams and events
  • Tracking in real time and predicting where people, or payloads will be
  • BI in real time
• Big hardware
  • Cloud platforms
  • Massively parallel data base machines

And scalability is needed to support all of the above.

Directions Magazine Launches “Channels”

Today, we at Directions Magazine offer you a new way of getting news with the launch of "Channels," websites dedicated to specific industries or technologies. Please take a moment to visit the following and give us your feedback by writing to us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address):

• State and Local Government
  • Our channel for municipal and state government applications with a focus on standards, data compilation, and the interaction with federal initiatives, NSGIC and the FDGC.

• Location-based Services and Mobile Computing

  • Our channel for mobile computing and location-enabled applications, from navigation to mobile resource management as well as social networking.

• Location Intelligence and Business Geographics

  • Our channel for enterprise geospatial technology and business analytics with particular emphasis on the retail, real estate, banking, insurance, and transportation sectors.

• Remote Sensing and Geospatial Intelligence/GEOINT

  • Our channel for earth observation and geospatial intelligence, from satellite and airborne platforms to sensor networks, 3D and LiDAR
    
    Our objective is to segment the news so that you’re getting the most up-to-date information on a daily basis that directly pertains to your interest. We hope to build upon these initial four Channels and bring you news on Health, Education, Computing, Energy and more. Stay tuned.

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?

InformationWeek Reports BI Business Grows 22% in ‘08; Will LI follow?

Citing studies by Gartner, the market research firm, InformationWeek reports that business intelligence (BI) software solutions grew 22% in 2008 to $8.8 billion with only six vendors comprising 75% of the market: SAP/Business Objects, Oracle, IBM/Cognos, SAS, Microsoft, and Microstrategy. SAP/Business Objects own 24% of the market outright with $2.1 billion in revenue. Gartner suggested some bifurcation of the market with IT departments either purchasing "stack-centric" solutions (e.g. IBM, Oracle, etc.) or targeted solutions for specific departments thus leaving mid-tier BI players with decreasing revenue.

It got me thinking about two issues:

1. Are location intelligent (LI) solutions following the same trend: Will the larger, "stack centric" LI providers like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP be the leaders in the LI space? Are they already?

2. Will LI be absorbed into BI as just another weapon for the BI solution vendors?

Netezza Appliance “Visited”

We’ve written before on the Netezza data warehouse appliance that supports the OGC simple feature specifications and hopes to offer clients exceedingly fast performance with high volumes of data (think terabytes). So,  on the exhibit floor of the GEOINT Symposium I got an up-close look at the basic device. If you’ve taken apart a deskside computer you’d recognize that it has the same basic components: a hard drive, processor and memory. What would be new is the "secret sauce," a silicon chip with the embedded proprietary logic to strip out certain extraneous bytes such as SQL statements and simply use the location-based data. This firmware approach to dealing with the complexities of massive amounts of data is amplied when these simple sleaves of hardware are rack mounted - 120 fold. The Netezza appliance is composed of 120 such devices described above in the company’s Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing architecture. According to their literature on Netezza Spatial "each intelligent node…is an independent computer optimized specifically to accelerate analytic query performance on large data volumes."

The argument about whether you replace an Oracle Spatial or ArcSDE may be a question for some but it may not be an either/or situation. Netezza will first process the data using the ETL functions of Safe’s FME which loads the spatial data into its firmware so it can bypass a typical database but many users have found an approach that works in tandem.