Becky Tamashasky, Vice President of Vision & Product Engineering, Cityworks® | Azteca Systems, LLC, replied to our questions at GISCafe Voice in addition to her interview with GISCafe CEO Sanjay Gangal:
When is your new release of Cityworks coming out?
Becky T: As part of a public company, I can’t provide exact details, but I can say with anticipation that it is coming soon!
Do you want clients to think of Esri and Cityworks as all one solution or are you looking to have them view the solutions separately?
Many of our clients already view Cityworks and Esri as one cohesive solution. As the leading GIS-centric solution for public asset management and community development, we have worked to provide a seamless experience for organizations, and we support the Esri identity for user authentication across Cityworks platform and mobile native apps. (more…)
Normally approximately 17,000 people attend Esri User Conference held in San Diego, California but this year, the conference has attracted upwards of 80,000 people online as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. While it is sad not to be gathered in San Diego, the sheer volume of people who are able to participate online makes it quite a phenomena for Esri, a 50-year-old company spearheading the GIS movement globally.
The 2020 Virtual Esri User Conference (Esri UC) Is next week, July 13-17. Of course this year all conferences are virtual and it will be interesting to see how the user conference that we all know and look forward to each year in San Diego will play in virtual space.
For Esri, this is an inflection point; as a company as they have been very active in the virtual geospatial marketplace for a long time. They have been working on digital transformation and work-from-home initiatives for about two years now.
Close to 70,000 people are attending this year; in past years attendance has been around 17,000.
The constraints thrust upon us are spurring innovation, according to Esri CMO Marianna Kantor.
Esri is very good at crisis management, specifically the disaster response program. The Johns Hopkins University dashboard tracks all the covid cases in the world.
Among the stats brought forward:
The types of events you have grown to look forward at Esri UC will be available in virtual format, including the Plenary, Expo and technology workshops, Map Gallery Tour, SIGs, special sessions and educational sessions. Those registered will receive a Platform direction guide.
Central Live is a TV like component to the event, hosted live by an Esri executive.
Plenaries will be split into three days, with Jack Dangermond’s plenary on Monday. On Tuesday will be technology enhancement plenary, and Wednesday will be joined by Jeffrey Sachs, president of UN Sustainable Development Solutions and Vicki Phillips, executive vice president and CEO of National Geographic Society.
Head of Global Business Development, Jeff Peters, said that Esri wants to become as much a leader in virtual technology as in the physical world.
“If there was any doubt of role of GIS being a mission critical technology in organization, look at any federal, state, government authorities around the world and we are seeing transformation happen right before us,” said Peters.
“It’s a bit of crisis culture, and covid-19 is one of those. The DRP program provided technology to over 4500 organizations and some work done on our racial equity hub, with Esri work supporting organizations around the world with transparency. Even as you shift to more recent events, for example, around the locust response we’re seeing locusts impact both Asia and Africa, potentially many could lose their lives. As a company Esri identifies these crisis events and ask, what can we do with real work to help users customers and citizens respond to those events?”
Peters said the the Johns Hopkins dashboard is up to almost a trillion views since launch. “At the peak of the use of Esri’s stat system ArcGIS Online saw 12 billion transactions per day, and was the #3 most visited website in the world. The technology is absolutely mission critical. The theme of interconnecting our world, the value of geospatial infrastructure will be discussed, including using AI, analytics, mobile clients, and bringing technology and making it pervasive for both the private and public sector is our continued ambition.”
Bristol, UK, Earth observation company 4 Earth Intelligence has created a UK street level map of ‘at risk’ areas to help plan for and manage the effects of extreme hot weather conditions using satellites. Their Heat Hazard Postcode data is being made available free at the point of use to national organizations and multi-agency partnerships, such as Local Resilience Forums, that are currently battling the coronavirus pandemic. Created with support from the Ordnance Survey through their Covid-19 Response licensing, the data is expected to be helpful in determining geographic areas experiencing extreme heat this summer.
This is our final installment of Industry Predictions for 2020. Topics this week include satellites, Cloud for geospatial applications, data storage, data sentience, data sovereignty, growth, location, mapping fleets and much more.
Representatives from CubeWerx, DataCapable, T-mapy, GeoSapient, Inc. and Mapillary offer their insights into the industry and trends for the future.
GISCafe Industry Predictions for 2020 move forward into February. Topics covered this week are cloud-based asset management systems, artificial intelligence, smart cities, citizen science, open source mapping and data, GNSS advancements, big spatial data analytics, drone industry, enterprise scale and dashboards and data visualizations.
We have received an overwhelming response to our request for Industry Predictions for 2020. This demonstrates that many people are thinking ahead to ways to make GIS and geospatial technology better and more productive in the coming year and beyond.
We’re coming down the home stretch with our GISCafe Industry Predictions, so if you haven’t sent yours in, please feel free to do so until January 20th, for inclusion in a series of editorial articles to be published in January. This article is the third installment of those articles.
The year in review is defined in large part by what drives the technology sector. Natural phenomenon such as fires and floods, earthquakes and hurricanes require continual vigilance to be able to record, predict, respond to and recover from. The effort of Digital Cities is an effort to maintain cities in a more efficient manner, with heightened emphasis on people and data.