Will Mapping Applications Provide New Revenue Streams? Particularly ESRI MapIt

A interesting article has appeared up in the Reseller News this week by Chris Bell. It talks about how resellers should get onto the mapping bandwagon and whether mapping application will provide new revenue streams.

Geographic information systems (GIS) mapping applications are already being used internationally to do everything from matching ISPs’ broadband supply with demand to providing pawnbrokers with market analysis.

This is aligned around the press release that we did in conjunction with Microsoft New Zealand for ESRI MapIt

ESRI’s software is used in more than 300,000 organisations worldwide, the company says. “MapIt is the result of a close collaboration with Microsoft,” says Jack Dangermond, ESRI’s president. “It’s a new mapping product for business intelligence that fits well with the IT infrastructure.”

The new product combines software with services to enable businesses to create maps that display enterprise data. MapIt works on the Microsoft application platform, taking enterprise data from SQL Server 2008 and Excel and displaying it as maps in interactive applications based on Microsoft’s web application framework, the Adobe Flash competitor Silverlight; Windows Presentation Foundation; or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007.

MapIt incorporates what its developers describe as a “geocoder”, to transform information based on addresses and postcodes into geographic coordinates that can be displayed along with other business data on a map.

Chris goes on to talk about the increased access for SMB’s, the unfulfilled potential offerings. Talking about how Microsoft Business Partners are adopting and developing offerings based on MapIt locally and internationally.

Microsoft is also pitching a combination of MapIt and SQL Server 2008 as a way for companies to provide a cost-effective offering to customers holding location-based information. With SQL Server 2008’s spatial features and the development capabilities within Microsoft’s partner network, Ackhurst says the software giant is starting to see spatial data and location intelligence being developed and deployed by mainstream partners. “The release of MapIt further accelerates this by simplifying the skills required for using spatial data in business intelligence solutions and other applications that make use of geographic information.”

Chris also talks about the availability of MapIt in New Zealand with some good references to Gartner research around the revenue from consumer location-based services.

In New Zealand MapIt is available through Microsoft channel partners and a free evaluation download is available from ESRI’s website. Ackhurst won’t say which local developers, other than Eagle, are developing on top of Mapit and won’t provide numbers, saying it’s “commercially sensitive”.

Read the rest of this full feature article can be found here: http://reseller.co.nz/reseller.nsf/…