Reflections on the 2010 ESRI FedUC
Cloud Ready
Well I’m sure you’ve all heard the news. ESRI is now an Amazon Independent Software Vendor.
This means of course that we’ll see some ArcGIS Server in the Amazon Cloud very soon. In fact if you are an ESRI ELA user, you can take advantage of this right now using one of the pre-built AWS AMIs. Licensing still hasn’t been outlined by ESRI, which is probably why the ELA is required, but it seems like we could be close to hourly ArcGIS Server instances by next year. The AMI isn’t anything special, just a Windows Server AMI with ArcGIS Server at this point.
The WeoGeo booth was right next to Amazon (or maybe Amazon was right next to WeoGeo, hmmm) and there seemed to be some traffic and lots of questions. Answers weren’t that concrete from what I heard and Amazon looked rushed into being there, but it did appear people made an effort to seek them out and talk about GIS in AWS. At this point ESRI and Amazon is so early in the public relationship that we’ll have to wait for the BPC/DevSummit or most likely the International UC to get the real details.
The Plenary
OK so ESRI in the cloud didn’t knock your socks off, the inevitability of the whole thing at this point seemed to make many feel like it was anticlimactic. Tough world we live in.
Jack’s plenary talk was as always razor sharp on what ESRI is doing for their Federal customers and as always sets the stage for the year. As I alluded to early, the phrase “Cloud Ready” is something we’ll be hearing a ton about with ArcGIS 10. This means a couple things, first off it integrates with other cloud services with the REST API (something many have already been doing for years), second they’ve got this Amazon AWS AMI which you can license to run a full ArcGIS Server (without any scaling of course) in Amazon’s cloud and third I think it means that ESRI’s web services are going to essentially make even private or internal clouds “GIS Ready” (that’s my term in the spirit of Cloud Ready).
I think the Plenary was well received by the crowd, but they seemed quiet. I’d probably feel the same way if Mother Nature dumped a ton of snow on me for a couple weeks. Some interesting take-aways from the talk is ESRI’s focus on private clouds, which I think aligns very well with the FedUC crowd. Their focus on mobile was very apparent and I think at this point every reference to a Windows Mobile device has been removed from Jack’s slides and replaced with an iPhone. ESRI’s focus on web services means that they can transition to mobile devices with their mobile APIs (Ah, here is the iPhone API ready to work).
Jack focused on the large picture architecture of ArcGIS 10 and then it came for others on the ESRI team to come out and demo. We saw a good overview of ESRI’s ArcGIS Online map services. This world Topo map ESRI has been working on is really special. The cartography just catches your eye and that it goes down to 1:1000k 1:1k (off by a little scale factor there) scale in large cities really makes me want to use it instead of street map services. ArcGIS Explorer Online is a really slick Silverlight app that seems to emulate much of the ArcGIS Explorer (except 3D of course), which might be a good general GIS web services browser for ESRI users. They keep hiding the URL so so I can’t share it, but it was something like http://explorerweb.arcgis.com or similar. We’ll see it soon enough I guess.
It’s About Servers
Then the most surreal part of the whole FedUC occurred. John Calkins ran over his overview of ArcGIS Desktop 10 as he always does. If you’ve never seen John give this talk, you can view one here. John as always did a really good job and some of the refinement of ArcGIS Desktop 10 is simply amazing. The editing environment, threaded geoprocessing and symbology improvements really puts ArcGIS Desktop way beyond anything any other GIS vendor is doing. But what caught me off guard was the crowd’s reaction to it. As I said earlier, the crowd seemed tired and not into things, but during the Desktop demo I heard some things that really amazed me.
“Why isn’t this demo in Flash (or Silverlight)?”
“Why isn’t he using an iPhone to do this?”
“Do people still use ArcMap?”
Here was a crowd that I thought would eat Desktop alive because they spend all day in it and many just didn’t care anymore. (Note: I don’t have super hearing so I could only listen to those in front or behind me) Could we finally be at a big shift in mentality where we are breaking out of these large legacy desktop clients and toward lightweight mobile and web clients for analysis? Are users finally listening to our “web is where the magic happens” talks and taking it to heart? Not sure, but it was interesting.
Now before everyone declares desktop GIS dead, lets be realistic here. Content creation tools are still not developed on mobile devices or web clients to the point were you can get the accuracy you need so for many users Desktop is still a required element and will probably be for decades to come. But I do think that average users of GIS, even those institutionalized in the federal service, are ready for this mobile, crowdsourcing future that we are just about to enjoy.
Crowdsourcing? ESRI?
Yep, Jack talked quite a bit about VGI (Volunteered Geographic Information) which of course is a term used to describe crowdsourcing/neogeogrpahy/participatory GIS or whatever else is the term of the hour. Dave Smith did a really good job of summarizing crowdsouricng and ESRI on his blog so I’d like to point you there from some reading. ESRI has put thought into ArcGIS’ place in VGI and how users will want to get information in and out. I think as ArcGIS 10 progresses we’ll see much more on this and how ESRI users can edit things such as OpenStreetMap directly from their ArcMap clients. I think the International UC should show us much more detail on how this is going to all work.
On the Floor of the Expo
We at WeoGeo of course were on the floor showing what we are doing with ArcGIS and the cloud but so were many others. Amazon was there of course as I said. GeoEye was but DigitalGlobe wasn’t. NAVTEQ and DeLorme were, but TeleAtlas wasn’t. I saw friends at VoyagerGIS and Arc2Earth (who was at the New Light Technologies booth) were there showing their latest products. Ran into Stu Rich at PenBayMedia showing off some of their very impressive building interior modeling and of course everyone else from SAIC to lone GIS professionals who stopped by to say hello.
2010 in the ESRI Community
So as always the FedUC kicks off the ESRI year. We’ll see much more at the BPC and DevSummit next month, but the message is simple. ArcGIS 10 will interact with “the cloud” no matter what that term means to you. The more I see with ArcGIS 10, the more I can see why they named it 10 rather than 9.4. It really is a break from what ESRI was doing in the past on both the Desktop and the Server. ArcGIS 10 should arrive early Summer (not to jinx anything of course), probably before the International UC so we can all give it a test run before we show up in San Diego.
I hadn’t been to a FedUC in more years than I can recall. It was really great to see how much this conference has grown and how many more people are interested in geospatial technology as well as how people have embraced the concept of web services, web clients and mobile GIS as more than just a display tool. Should be a very exciting year.
One of the advantages of moving to the cloud is harnessing of all of that horsepower, but I did not get the impression (just watched the videos) that the underlying capabilities had changed a great deal. The real power of ArcGIS is geoprocessing, but if the geoprocessing engine does not support 64-bit operating systems and multi-threading I do wonder what benefit the cloud will bring on that front. Getting things up on an interactive web map is wonderful, but it does not hurt to be able to do some high-end analysis on occasion. Despite major improvements in computer architecture our ability to run geoprocessing operations has not advanced much from the ArcINFO command line days.
Outstanding observations and why I still do a few things at the command line.
No kidding!
At the PUG a senior ESRI rep told me they are still sorting out how pay-as-you-go pricing will work for Amazon EC2 AMI’s running ArcGIS. He said this is a good time to make suggestions. The following is my suggestion. I encourage other ArcGIS developers to do the same.
As an ESRI business partner, a big part of my business involves adding value to ArcGIS by writing extensions. I suggest that ESRI figure out a way so that a business partner can take an ArcGIS AMI, install his own extensions, register with Amazon DevPay, then deploy it for others to buy and use. Part of the revenue stream would go to ESRI, with the other part going to the business partner.
In reading through the DevPay documentation it is not clear to me if payments can be layered like that, but I think something should be possible. I recall hearing about some other company that allocates value added revenue for geodata purchased over AWS .
I wonder if the prospect of any dumb terminal or netbook becoming the new ESRI desktop has perhaps inspired a bit of “Freudenschade” in Redlands?
Beginning of the ESRI year? James this stuff is so last month. All this information already dropped at the California/Nevada/Hawaii Regional Users Group Meeting in Redlands.
You should have been there; it was a real hoot.
Thanks for the write up!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjfaCoA2sQk
@Mein cloud
Not half as hilarious as
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpZXhR1ibj8
James,
You just didn’t see the DigitalGlobe booth – not hard to do at any show with so many exhibits of varying sizes. They were there in fine form.
Nice write-up. Thanks.
Not sure how I didn’t see you guys. I must have walked by your booth 30 times over the week. Either I’m blind or you booth was a little stealthy.
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Really?
Will it really run as a 64bit app?
Or will it launch and run thru the x86 directory as 32bit?
You can do that with ArcGIS now – so that’s no thing. But really leveraging the 64bit headspace? Now that’s something.
Fact check, please
Man that’s good news!
Before you get too excited, note that my responses have my face next to them.
Not saying that my clone doesn’t know what he’s talking about, just that I haven’t seen that news personally.
Now there is a fake James Fee? I thought the fake Ed Parsons was enough.
If you’re reading into my comment that ArcGIS will actually run as a full 64bit app on a 64bit machine, then you are mistaken. I don’t know whether it will or won’t but if it does it’ll be a HUGE surprise to everyone across the beta community. And require a major rewrite of the code and imply Morehouse forked the dev stream months and months ago to make it happen and hid it from all of us. [Not]
I believe the previous sentence in my comment is the governing statement here – that ArcGIS already runs as 32bit app inside the x86 directory that’s on every 64bit Wintel box. They put it there to accommodate laggards and legacy products that haven’t upgraded to the 64bit OS.
ATTENTION – the IA-32 Execution Layer that’s the foundation for running a 32bit app inside the 64bit OS imposes significant performance degradation on the 32bit app, as compared to its operations on a native 32bit OS.
So if you want to run your 32bit ArcGIS inside 64bit OS you can, using the x86 directory and the IA-32 Execution Layer. But be forewarned the performance will suck harder than it did when it sucked on a 32bit box.
As for an inference of genetic duplication, I can attest there’s quite a few branches of the tree between me and Fee.
From whom I am still waiting for a fact check on the Dangermondian pronouncement, I might add.
What say you, Jaime?
But be forewarned the performance will suck harder than it did when it sucked on a 32bit box.
Archie, this is not my experience. But there are many factors at play, for example, each app gets it’s own 32-bit address space to play in — instead of fighting for physical RAM with the OS and other applications.
Basic I/O operations can also soup up a bit, even if you are running in that 32-bit layer.
I’ve been running a host of 32-bit apps (ArcGIS, ERDAS IMAGINE, eCognition) on my Windows 7-64 box with 48GB or RAM for 8 months. All seem to run better than when I was using a 32-bit OS. In fact we were so impressed we moved other personnel over to 64-bit as well and upped their RAM.
What’s the theory behind the performance hit Archie?
I wonder if Jack meant ArcSDE rather than ArcGIS.
Maybe Linux will be added to the list of currently supported 64 bit platforms:
“ArcSDE is available as a native 64-bit application for Sun Solaris (Oracle and DB2), HP HP-UX (Oracle and DB2), HP Tru64 (Oracle), HP-Itanium (Oracle), and IBM AIX (Oracle and DB2).”
It is all about GIS Servers (and GIS Developers). It sure isn’t about the GIS Analyst.
No, desktop isn’t dead, but has it matured enough to say a new version ain’t what it used to be? Sure slippy maps in ArcMap 10 will be great, but that was done on the web five years ago. Multiple layouts are great too, but AV3x did that ten years ago. Innovation in the desktop ceased with 8.0. What’s being done now is fixing the design mistakes of 8.0 (ArcCatalog, Map Book as developer’s sample, etc).
ESRI knows the desktop has matured and users see more pain than gain in an update. That’s why the focus is to force a desktop update through adding and upgrading to additional products. Thus the focus on the server products, and thus GIS Developers.
In addition, GIS Developers are willing to work with alternative platforms. GIS Analysis aren’t. (Seriously how many times do you see a GIS Analysis try out an ESRI-alternative for the fun of it, verses a developer trying an ESRI-alternative to see if it can be done). Thus GIS Analysis are a captive market, while GIS Developers aren’t. So ESRI tries to woo the developers to expand, while frustrating their core user base (ala the ESRI-Hitler YouTube).
This can’t be good in the long run.
I have no opinion about this…
But if I did, I’d say ESRI is struggling to stay relevant by building server-side tools that are closer to the workflow of a ‘new generation’ of mashup/developers. Most of whom are quite pleased be able to associate their data with a physical location. [ESRI comment: sniff - hmmph, just dots on a map. Where's the power in that?]
That there are many viable alternatives, quite a few of which are far simpler and less expensive to execute on than ESRI, is probably not lost on Messrs. Dangermond, Morehouse, Derrenbacher, and Capelli.
Which is why they’re moving the company off products and into services, a la IBM. So much for their partners…
So, my latest project involved a lot of 10′ grids on a 500+ sq mi surface. My primary script executes in this pattern:
Select, thiessen, buffer, clip, calculate field, select, erase, select, euclidean distance, select, eucledian distance, reclassify, reclassify, con, con, max, minus. This takes… a while.
It should, instead, be able to execute like this: thiessen with snap polygon, weighted euclidean distance. This should take a few minutes
And I am still trying to solve two major geoprocessing problems: R-Tree search in space-time of point incidents, and kernel density estimation for space-time events with length in the space dimension.
I’m pretty confident that desktop GIS has not matured yet.
ArcGis with a foot in “the cloud” at AWS…
A couple of days behind – yet newsworthy: ESRI announced to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an AWS Independent Software Vendor (ISV). Practically, an ArcGIS Server is hosted as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) will be available with an upcoming Arc…
All,
The ‘fake James Fee’ post regaurding Jack texting him about 64-bit support, is a false statement. We are working on Native 64-bit support (we have it for SDE already), as a post 10 release. It is not part of the 10 release.
-Damian
dspangrud@esri.com
ESRI
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wow – Now a Fake Damian!! I am so blessed….
sigh…
Well, this is important work we’re doing Damian. This new release is very strong…it really is is very big. That’s interesting…don’t you think?
James, can’t you moderate this better? Who are these people?
Jack,
thank you for the large campaign contribution. We will get you some bailout money shortly.
-BO
Barack doesn’t get the money, Jerry Lewis does.
And those donations usually come back as a $10-15mil earmark in defense appropriations tagged to The Center for Innovative Geospatial Technology.
Editor’s Note: Really?
[...] I was surprised that the reaction of the audience around me was the exact opposite of what James Fee encountered at FedUC. While I wondered why the demo wasn’t being conducted live on an iPhone, everyone immediately [...]