Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute) dates to 1969, and is known throughout the world as the pioneer in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Led by its original founder and president, Jack Dangermond, the company today has embraced cloud computing as it’s grown to 3,000 employees serving 350,000 clients.

We had some questions for Dave Peters, Esri Manager for Systems Integration; our interview with him is provided below. Dave will also be speaking at @CloudExpo, on the topic of “Why Are Enterprises Flocking to SaaS Mapping and Location Analytics?”

Cloud Computing Journal: What are the big technical and organizational challenges you’ve seen in integrating cloud-based mapping and analysis within an existing enterprise IT architecture?

Dave Peters: Committing to investing in the cloud was our first challenge–and that was an organizational challenge that required teaming with a broad community of government and private agencies to build and share online geographic content (basemaps, street maps, imagery, and community maps) for the entire world. Once that commitment was made, our challenges were more of a technical nature and occurred in this order:
1. Building and maintaining content in a common framework for sharing geographic information. Partnering with Amazon and Microsoft, we delivered ArcGIS Online, a cloud-based geospatial platform that has been rapidly adopted and today supports millions of users worldwide.

2. Building and deploying a cloud-based portal technology that would be easy to use and simple to manage. Our goal was to establish a simple Software as a Service (SaaS) mapping architecture for sharing, collaborating, and publishing intelligent maps within a role based security framework to allow organization members to create groups and share content within a publisher-defined and controlled community of users.
3. Publishing Online Web Map information products to end users. Esri cloud-based portal technology includes ArcGIS Online downloadable apps that can share geographic content with a full range of desktop and mobile platforms including Android, iOS/MAC, Windows and Web browsers; users can publish online Web Maps and view content from any device at any location over the Internet.

4. Expanding online services to include geographic analysis delivered with the Web Maps. Esri partnered with Microsoft Azure to include high value geospatial services (spatial analysis functions, geocoding, demographics, and more) as an integral part of the cloud-based ArcGIS platform.
Like Esri, many organizations face challenges in adapting their business operations to changing business and social technology patterns (sharing, collaborating, and adapting to social change). They experience the social benefits at home – but are not ready and willing to risk this adjustment in their work place environment. We are seeing a new generation of business opportunities enabled by pervasive Internet access and social media, and empowered through deployment of cloud-based technology.
Organizations have the choice of using ArcGIS Online or deploying Portal for ArcGIS internally to build and maintain their own cloud. The biggest challenge for most organizations is one of trust with cloud-based security, and for this reason they choose to deploy Portal for ArcGIS to leverage benefits within their own organization.
CCJ: How have these challenges evolved over the past year, and how do you think they will evolve over the next few years?

Dave: The challenges for organizations to include ArcGIS Online services are rapidly evaporating, as Esri Cloud-based operations are reducing the complexity and expanding the usability of GIS technology throughout government, business, and a growing number of industries worldwide. Existing Customer ArcGIS investments include Cloud-based portal technology, accessed through ArcGIS Online or deployed on-premise with Portal for ArcGIS and ArcGIS for Server technology.

Many of the challenges we face over the next few years are driven by software, data, processing, and network technology – technology advances are increasing rapidly growing community demands on the available communication infrastructure:
The growing community interest and trust in Cloud-based operations may well outpace available Internet communication capacity over the next few years – there are GIS capabilities that still perform best on dedicated local desktop platforms.
New desktop applications are doubling and tripling processing and network infrastructure loads – really cool stuff that brings a world of information to life.
ArcGIS 3D spatial operations and real-time dynamic 3D virtualization is increasing demands on graphics processing and the existing Internet bandwidth infrastructure.
Heavy dynamic graphic processing and higher resolution client display traffic demands make professional desktop solutions difficult to deploy in a Cloud environment.
Performing real-time analysis on big data resources to solve problems in real-time is possible with emerging software and hardware technology – this is where GIS technology is going.

CCJ: What benefits do your customers ultimately receive once they’ve integrated your company’s solutions?

Dave: ArcGIS Online cloud-based content and services immediately expand ArcGIS customer GIS resources, enriching and building actionable geographic business intelligence that directly add to better understanding and more informed business operations. ArcGIS Online ready-to-use applications reduce deployment risk and rapidly deliver benefits to the organization that in the past would take several months to years to build on their own.
The ArcGIS Platform is fully integrated with existing on-premise Enterprise GIS operations. Customers with Internet access can leverage online content and receive Cloud-based service benefits within their current investment portfolio, continuing to leverage their existing investment as they expand capabilities to include online services and content. Customers that do not have Internet access can deploy Portal for ArcGIS on-premise and benefit from the same cloud-based content management capabilities.
The ArcGIS Online Maps and Apps are simple and easy to use, and include access to free online video training. Any member of an ArcGIS Online organization can easily build and share a story map. Web maps can be shared and viewed on any device using free Android, iOS/MAC, and Windows Esri map clients available from the proprietary app stores. They can be shared to members within the organization, to groups of users you identify for collaboration and sharing, or with the public community.
ArcGIS Online includes simple mapping and location analytics through an Esri Maps plug-in to your existing business application (Microsoft Office, SharePoint, and Dynamics CRM; SAP; Salesforce; IBM Cognos, and more), integrating your business data with ArcGIS Online GIS mapping resources.
The advantages of available Cloud-based content and services for ArcGIS customers are compelling. Cloud technology has transformed ArcGIS to a fully integrated open platform for organizations to discover, create, manage, visualize, analyze, and collaborate using geographic information on a global scale.

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Video management and delivery has become increasingly challenging due to the diversity of solutions, mobile devices, platforms and video formats. As a result, companies are often required to piece together multiple solutions and vendors to get what they need.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, James Segil, CMO of Verizon Digital Media Services, will address the challenges of streaming live and on-demand adaptive video to multiple platforms and devices by moving the workflow from hardware-dependent infrastructure to software and cloud-based infrastructure. He will demonstrate how Verizon Digital Media Services eliminates complexity, instead of managing it, with a simpler, more scalable approach that significantly reduces costs.

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As my East Coast friends say, “Let me ask you this.”

So, let me ask you this: how cloudy is Oracle now? How much of a consequential PaaS has the company made at the market? Is this a bold new vision, or will the company again be accused of cloudwashing and/or putting old wine into new bottles?

Email me or tweet me with your opinions. At the moment, I’m getting some industry opinion on background.

This we know: Oracle’s newly minted CTO Larry Ellison is taking the cloud seriously. Referring to the company’s official announcements this week, he said in public that Oracle is not just a SaaS like Salesforce and not just an IaaS like Amazon. He also alleges that no other company can match Oracle’s PaaS throughout the stack.

Enterprise IT is a multi-trillion-dollar market worldwide, with a graveyard littered by formerly mighty technology companies. Larry Ellison himself warned of industry consolidation years ago, with the observation that the future of Silicon Valley may be that of Detroit.

I doubt he was drawing this analogy far enough to mean that Japanese, German, and Korean cars were going to almost fatally wound American companies. But he was clearly of the mind that no company is secure forever, and he intended his company to be sure everyone else is more insecure than him.

To me, it seems as if this early discussion of Oracle’s apparent new strategy is its focus on public cloud. It also seems as if the term “public cloud” may be headed for history’s dustbin, as more of us think in terms of onsite and offsite rather than public and private, with some sort of hybrid emerging at large enterprises.

Marten Mickos drew a skillful analogy between cloud and beer for us, just before he was tapped as HP’s new cloud leader through the acquisition of Eucalyptus.

But let me ask you this: what do you think?

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SYS-CON Events, Inc. named Cisco “Gold Sponsor” of upcoming Cloud Expo, co-located with 3rd International Internet of @ThingsExpo, the largest IoT event in the world. 15th International Cloud Expo will take place November 4-6, 2014 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. Cisco will present a number of technical sessions, including a general session which will be announced next week.

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Storage administrators find themselves walking a line between meeting employees’ demands to use public cloud storage services, and their organizations’ need to store information on-premises for security, performance, cost and compliance reasons. However, as file sharing protocols like CIFS and NFS continue to lose their relevance, simply relying only a NAS-based environment creates inefficiencies that hurt productivity and the bottom line. IT wants to implement cloud storage it can purchase and own like NAS (NTAP) but that works like traditional public cloud storage services like Dropbox, Box and Google Drive.

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With the explosion of the cloud, more businesses are transitioning to a recurring revenue model to generate reliable sales, grow profits, and open new markets. This opportunity requires businesses to get to market quickly with the pricing and packaging options customers want. In addition, you will want to take advantage of the ensuing tidal wave of data to more effectively upsell, cross-sell and manage your customers. All of this is possible, but only with the right approach.
At 15th Cloud Expo, Brendan O’Brien, Co-founder at Aria Systems and the inventor of cloud billing panelists, will lead a panel discussion on what it takes to launch and manage a successful recurring revenue business. The panelists will offer their insights about what each department will need to consider, from financial management to line of business and IT. The panelists will also offer examples from their success in recurring revenue with companies such as Audi, Constant Contact, Experian, Pitney-Bowes, Telekom Denmark and others. This panel will include Brendan O’Brien from Aria Systems, Chief Architect and inventor of cloud billing, and a host of executives with varying subject matter and department expertise.

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We have discussed new ways a User can install our Windows Agent from the command line. Now we’ll explore more goodies for Users deploying the command line on Windows.

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With the explosion of the cloud, more businesses are transitioning to a recurring revenue model to generate reliable sales, grow profits, and open new markets. This opportunity requires businesses to get to market quickly with the pricing and packaging options customers want. In addition, you will want to take advantage of the ensuing tidal wave of data to more effectively upsell, cross-sell and manage your customers. All of this is possible, but only with the right approach.
At 15th Cloud Expo, Brendan O’Brien, Co-founder at Aria Systems and the inventor of cloud billing panelists, will lead a panel discussion on what it takes to launch and manage a successful recurring revenue business. The panelists will offer their insights about what each department will need to consider, from financial management to line of business and IT. The panelists will also offer examples from their success in recurring revenue with companies such as Audi, Constant Contact, Experian, Pitney-Bowes, Telekom Denmark and others. This panel will include Brendan O’Brien from Aria Systems, Chief Architect and inventor of cloud billing, and a host of executives with varying subject matter and department expertise.

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Picture credit: Antony Hammond/Flickr

If I asked you to name a multi-billion dollar market that’s getting a long overdue cloud makeover, would field service management be at the forefront of your mind?

It should. This $15 billion industry has only just begun to dip its toe into the huge pool of possibility thanks to software as a service, the tablet and smartphone revolution, and senior management’s recognition that service is indeed strategic. Add to this the commercial insight into addressable revenue-generating opportunities and the resulting top line growth, and you’ve got a new cloud darling.

Service businesses represent around 70% of the world’s economy, yet to date, only about a third of the world’s large service businesses currently use field service management solutions. It’s a market poised for growth, and it’s applicable to all vertical service industries and businesses of any size.

Until now the efficiency, productivity and disruption of the cloud had passed the field service industry by

Over the past forty years, service hasn’t really changed that much. There’s a lot of paper, a lot of disjointed, manual processes, and no meaningful connection between the field service technician and the context of a customer’s business challenges. You can’t actually track data on paper, particularly in an economy that depends upon the swift, accurate transmission of information. Field service is an industry that was comparatively slow to join the information economy and typically does not move at the same pace as the rest of the business. Until now, the efficiency, productivity and disruption of the cloud had passed the field service industry by.

But that’s all changing. Empowering service technicians with cloud-based, real time tools in the field means they can do work-orders, request parts, schedule and be scheduled, look up manuals, take payments, renew maintenance agreements, use social channels to communicate problems swiftly and effectively and upsell and cross sell products and solutions where appropriate.

All of this is done on a smartphone or a tablet. All the data is real-time and technicians have the ability to work offline, saving time consuming administration at the end of a job. And customer relationship management systems pick up the information and ensure that the customer receives future communications, advice, updates and education. And of course, all of that data is delivering valuable new insights about your businesses and customers. 

There are more than fifteen million field technicians globally. Most of them are not working this way…yet.  But CEOs are increasingly waking up to the ‘sleeping giant’ that is their service department.

On average, service margins are nearly eleven percent higher than equipment margins, and in a recovering economy with delayed capital equipment purchases, that counts for a lot. Better yet, with the right tools in place, service centres can transform from being a cost overhead to a profit centre, delivering leads, taking orders and providing customer intelligence.

CEOs are increasingly waking up to the sleeping giant that is their service department

Field service isn’t exactly known for being a sexy or even innovative industry, but there are some major developments on the horizon that could soon change its image. The Industrial Internet is just one example. There are currently around 25 billion devices connected to the internet. By 2020, this figure is expected to rise to 50 billion. As a planet, our civilisation now depends on machines working. It’s already commonplace for manufacturers to track machine performance of high end equipment with technicians determining whether a problem can be resolved remotely, reducing the costs of unnecessary service visits.

However, in the future, machine to machine learning will mean that equipment will communicate with technicians about specific faulty parts, with the machine essentially telling the service department when it is ‘sick’.  Likewise, in another ten years, it may be commonplace for field techs to have 3D printers in their vans to simply print the parts they require.  Gamification techniques may also be used to reward service techs for making an SLA, cross selling, or supporting another engineer with a phone fix.

Granted, this is not how conventional field service operates today, but I think these sorts of advances are just a matter of time. Joining the cloud revolution is just the first step, and as a result, we will see incredible changes in both the short term and longer term.

Cloud and mobility adoption are creating a new breed of field service management solutions that are radically re-defining what ‘business as usual’ means for the field service industry.