Podcast: Why is it so Hard to Sell Geospatial Technology to the Enterprise?

Senior executives from leading technology companies, speaking at our Location Intelligence Conference last week shared that the entire value proposition for spatial enablement is a “push” to the market rather than a “pull” or demand for the technology. Our editors ask: Are we doing an adequate job of selling the technology to more of the people that will eventually implement geospatial tools with other IT solutions.?Why is it still so hard? What are we not doing well? Will it take another “Google Earth” to push the technology deeper into corporate computing or a new crop of graduates to be more geospatially enlightened?

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Top Ten Things I learned at LI 2008

10. Location-based marketing, for trade shows at least, can passively capture information otherwise missed from standard lead management systems. The use of active RFID tags and ultra wideband sensors can capture the “who” and “how long” of people that are standing in front of your booth on a trade show floor and you don’t even have to talk to them. The Ubisense/Fish Software demonstration of RFID provided a context for better understanding the use of sensor technology where before I could only read about it.

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Quote of the Day: “Mashups have done more for this industry…”

At LI 2008, Dr. Robert Uleman of IBM suggested that "Mashups have done more for this industry than two decades of sending out products into the world."

Quote of the Day: “GIS should be invisible…”

At LI 2008, Berk Charlton of Pitney Bowes Group 1 suggested that "GIS should be invisible." Going further to illustrate his point about how the success of location technology will be underscored when "people don’t know that GIS has been done to them."

Microsoft-the leading BI vendor?

In a recent Gartner report, Microsoft ranks as the top business intelligence (BI) vendor outpacing COGNOS, Business Objects and Microstrategy, according to an article in InformationWeek. The report cites Microsoft’s bundling of products and price as the main attractiveness of the company’s BI offering in addition to its software quality.

As a review, note that several acquisitions in the BI space have occurred recently. Within the last year, Oracle bought Hyperion; SAP bought Business Objects, and IBM bought COGNOS; and in 2006 Microsoft bought ProClarity. The InformationWeek article suggests that BI is being commoditized or entering the mainstream, which ever way your want to characterize it.

Now, to the point about location intelligence. Oracle is already introducing Oracle location-based solutions into its BI products and not just resting on the fact that it is in a dominant position in supporting GIS application. Yesterday, I got a demo from SAP about how they are integrating mapping tools with CRM as part of their Sagres project. In the past, the BI vendors have acknowledged location is important to visualizing business data relationships but never indulged the applications except with arms-length agreements with MapInfo or ESRI.

Now things are changing. As BI players are acquired by larger IT companies and location technology remains in the forefront of the big players, (I cite the release of spatial datatype support by Microsoft in SQL Server 2008 and SAP’s continued development of Sagres as an example of this), location technology too will finally reach BI applications in a much more visible way. What will be interesting to see is how these companies demo their BI solutions. If they put spatial analysis as their leading show-stopper for customers, the days of GIS as a technology relegated to the guy making maps in the backroom are over.