Winding down from ESRI UC and hot topics this year

Well, another ESRI UC has come and gone for many of us… I’m still trying to regroup after 5 busy days on the West Coast. There’s still plenty of activity taking place today including the official launch (ceremonial) of the Service At Sea journey… an educational initiative taking GIS to people who need it – see more on this below. I had many people ask me, “so, what’s hot this year”… well, that depends on what you need, however, I can say that just a few of the hot/cool things that I observed at the conference include (but not limited to) Server – ArcGIS Server is huge and the server products are indeed becoming a huge part of ESRI’s offerings… I’m hearing numbers like 30%+ of sales/revenues coming from this space. I also heard much reference to simple mashup creation and use of the REST API as being hot and big in this area – seeing ArcGIS services on top of Google Maps and Virtual Earth basemaps was definitely cool! Image server is a tremendous solution and the offering for mobile solutions keep on coming (so do the licenses!). Cool products like those coming from TopCon and Trimble (like the Juno) are making life much easier for mobile users and field workers.

On the floor there were several touch table solutions being presented, obviously a hot product for the defense users – the DIT-2 from Panoram definitely turned heads! An update to Geographic Imager from Avenza was announced this week… offering users more flexibility and enhancements to help them be more productive working with imagery… the added support for tiling is likely the most noteworthy update users will enjoy. The Definiens extension for ArcGIS is also an amazing app that enables power users of imagery with ArcGIS to conduct feature extraction, change detection, and object recognition… all within a familiar environment.

GeoMarc from GCS Research was demo’d to me and indeed this app is a tremendous offering for those using/publishing imagery… embed sensitive information within your imagery, even store meta-data as well – truly a clever solution! Got loads of output? The Oce TCS500 with map folder setup is one of those “WOW” technologies… imagine letting that plotter crank out plots all night long and your output is automatically folded according your specifications… cool! The gang from Latitude Geographics (Victoria) also filled me in on how their gamble to roll the dice and bet on .Net has paid off – think rapid/real-world ArcGIS Server application development using the .NET version of Web ADF.

I could go on and on but if I had to pick out several hot topics/buzz words I’d definitely have to say Server, Imagery, mobile, ease of use, mashups, and interoperability rank right up there at the top. Ok, I need a nap then I’ll get back to sifty through the notes! See photos from San Diego HERE – I didn’t get to the windup party last night as I was in transit… how was it??