We knew GIS was Changing. Enter SpotOn Maps
Posted by Dave Kerr on Wed, Dec 15, 2010
If you read my earlier post about slowly changing BI, you know I believe that the time is right for integrating maps into business intelligence.
This is something we at SpotOn have known for quite some time, and is in fact the reason SpotOn Vantage Maps came into existence. We saw two distinct enterprise solutions, often targeted at the same industries, with little or no integration or synergy. So we changed that.
It's refreshing to see that we're not alone in our assessment of where this is all going. We've always known that the BI aspect of Geospatial Business Intelligence (GBI) was critical. So it was nice to see some affirmation, from the ARC Advisory Group, in the form of an article entitled GIS: An Enterprise Software Market in Transition.
In this article Clint Reiser, an Analyst at ARC Advisory Group whose areas of expertise include GIS, asserts that the GIS market is evolving to more of a supporting role with respect to other enterprise software solutions. He asserts:
"If the current trends continue, pure-play GIS will take on the role of a supporting technology within a broader set of solutions that are focused on a well-defined customer segment."
We tend to agree.
It's been a guiding principle behind the design of SpotOn Vantage Maps, and more recently of SpotOn Vantage Maps Starter Kit for IBM Cognos. After all, BI has been top-of mind for CIOs (according to Gartner) for many years now, and is well into production in many well-defined customer segments. It's only natural that enterprise GIS should start adding value to those thousands of BI applications as only enterprise GIS can.