ArcGIS Online previewed at 2012 Esri Federal GIS Conference

Jeff Peters, Director Federal Programs for Esri spoke with GISCafe’s Sanjay Gangal at the recent Esri Federal GIS Conference in Washington, D. C.

Sanjay Gangal: How many people are attending the conference?

Jeff Peters: There are 3400 registered, and an additional 300 people registered today so we think the number will be around 3700 people altogether. There will be about 70-74 exhibitors.

Sanjay Gangal: What is the purpose of the show?

Jeff Peters: This year we did things differently: one we changed the name – calling it the 2012 Esri Federal GIS conference. We wanted to do outreach to not only Esri users, but also to users of geospatial technology. When we looked at the numbers of people attending, a lot of attendees were first time attendees of an Esri Conference. 70% of the people attending are not even Esri users, they are users of geospatial technology. Key messages we have at this conference include emphasis on the cloud, from a policy perspective; coming out of the White House this is critical for us.  The costs savings and efficiencies that are coming along as a result of cloud and cloud technology are big to the government.  Esri has a wonderful offering with ArcGIS Online; we have ArcGIS Online on-premise, and we have about 40 agencies across federal government that are implementing ArcGIS Online on-premise.  Some are intelligence agencies where implementation of ArcGIS Online is behind the firewall. The geoplatform that was announced today that is a hybrid implementation, meaning it includes ArcGIS Online provided from Esri as well as ArcGIS Online within their infrastructure.

Sanjay Gangal: Can you explain what ArcGIS Online is for those who don’t know?

Jeff Peters: The cloud architecture is describe cloud as infrastructure, cloud as a service platform and cloud as  software as a service (SaaS). Esri is leveraging infrastructure as a service. Typically infrastructure providers are organizations like Amazon or Microsoft, Terramark, VCE or IBM. We are the software and platform providers that run on top of that infrastructure. Before when people would buy our technology, they would buy desktops or servers or licenses of technology. ArcGIS online allows you to subscribe to that. Instead of paying a perpetual license fee, you basically subscribe to it as a service. Subscription pricing will be available in the May/June timeframe. We have lots of people beta testing now.

Sanjay Gangal: Tell us about the new release, ArcGIS 10.1.

Jeff Peters: That is in beta now, to be released in the May timeframe. The release is an update across the board of our whole enterprise desktop stack: desktop technology more analytical tools, mobile technology in the context of more API. We say one map on any device, so that the map that you author on the desktop can be shared on a browser, device or as a service. 10.1 is really an across the board implementation of our traditional enterprise technology and the introduction of the cloud in ArcGIS Online.

Sanjay Gangal: You also mentioned lidar support.

Jeff Peters: Yes, we have ImageServer where you can take raw imagery in and provide it out as a service, processing it on the fly. We’ve done that with traditional imagery formats and now we’re doing it with lidar. We’ve got lots of customers with lidar DVDS or lidar stored on different systems and datasets so large it’s difficult to publish out. So with the technology you can point it to datasets and it can serve lidar on the fly very fast and efficiently – very large datasets. Talk about big data – this is allowing the organizing and publishing of big data.

Sanjay Gangal: Any other new announcements?

Jeff Peters: That’s it, obviously ArcGIS Online is what we’ve been working on for almost a year and is now operational. We also provide ArcGIS as a system that continues to serve our traditional desktop base and servers. The success of our customers is a big announcement:  U.S. Department of the Interior deputy secretary David J. Hayes talked about the geoplatform and how Esri technology is really driving a lot of initiatives the White House is providing,  and the advantages of the cloud.

Plenary sessions will all be available on the website: http://www.esri.com/events/fedcon/index.html

Tags: 2012 Esri Federal User Conference, Amazon, ArcGIS Online, cloud, datasets, ESRI, federal, geoplatform, geospatial, GIS, IBM, LiDAR, Microsoft, on-premise, satellite imagery, Terramark, VCE

Categories: Esri, mobile, satellite imagery

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