Paul Bissett has some great news on Safe Software entering a partnership with WeoGeo. This is great for users who have looked at the superb FME Server and wondered how the heck could they actually use it. WeoGeo gets that into the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and users benefit by being able to pay for what they use.
Details in the press release. Paul was hinting he had some news for GeoWeb and apparently he wasn’t kidding around. This could be a game changer for sure.
WeoGeo help FME Server into the cloud
7 responses so far ↓
1
Brian Timoney
// Jul 18, 2008 at 10:35 am
I look forward to the geoprocessing price wars: “Buy three buffering operations, and we’ll throw in a Convex Hull calculation for free…”.
Seems to me with the shortage of technical folks able to help their organizations harness the potential of “Server GIS”, a software-as-service option with a high usability factor might have a significant value proposition from the get-go.
Looking forward to seeing it in Vancouver.
BT
2
Johnny
// Jul 18, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Maybe I don’t get it, but why is this good news? What does “putting it in the cloud” mean to me, Joe GIS Guy?
3
James Fee
// Jul 18, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Johnny: I’m not a systems admin and my company can’t afford to pay the kind of money that is required to run web services ourselves at the speed and uptime that is really required.
If I can have Amazon or Google “run” my servers for me and then scale the process to meet the needs of my clients. For example remember Katrina? Extreme case, but if I had a web mapping site running MapServer or ArcIMS that had relevant information before, during and after the disaster, it was probably overwhelmed (and if it was located in NOLA it probably went down). If that map service was running in the cloud, it would have withstood the spike and kept running.
The other thing is as time goes on, maybe that map service becomes less “popular” and if I had invested in hardware/people to maintain the traffic spike, I’d have to worry about how to pay for that moving foward. With the cloud, traffic goes up, I pay more, traffic goes down, I pay less. As Brian was saying above, we are talking about pennies here, rather than thousands of dollars.
Plus the cloud doesn’t care if you have a PC/Mac/Linux. It is OS and database agnostic. Heck, the idea you can run FME on your iPhone is a pretty powerful though.
4
Andrew K
// Jul 18, 2008 at 9:04 pm
You guys are using the term ‘the cloud’ like its a new buzzword…but it doesn’t mean anything to anyone (other than Adena and i’m sure your not taking lessons from her…or are you?)…so get out of your cloud and describe it for what it is…make it real guys…make it mean something to the average user. As for this announcement…i don’t see the benefit…so now you can do a coordinate transformation on the fly when you order a data product from a website…what’s the big deal? Either we are desperate for something new and are blowing this totally out of proportion or have never see the capability to find a dataset, order it and get it delivered in a new format and new projection…what a novel idea!
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James Fee
// Jul 18, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Andrew K: I pretty much said what the cloud was above. I run my applications in a “data center” owned by someone else. I don’t have the time or energy or money or smarts to compete against Google’s data farms, so I’ll pay them pennies to use it. I talked about this concept about a year ago.
If the idea of running Safe FME Server on Amazon Web Services and not having to worry about how to make it run, how to keep it running or how to do it all cheaper than you could yourself, then this is a huge deal.
The idea is I no longer have to buy ArcInfo if I don’t use all the features all the time. Where this is going is that I’ll run little old ArcView, and when I need some complex ArcInfo license geoprocessing tool, I’ll just go out and pay someone the rights to use it once, by subscription or in some sort of combination.
Or how about this, you want to run some raster analysis. You computer keeps crashing because you aren’t as smart as those Manifold folks and run 32-bit Windows XP. Well how about offloading that processing to Google or Amazon and move on to something else. When it is done you get an email, GeoRSS or some other sort of alert telling you that your processing is done.
This isn’t about downloading data and converting it, is about moving your processing out from under you underpowered and overworked workstations and servers and into data centers that have more power than you could ever how to even look at, and are up 24/7.
Hey I enjoy performing GIS analysis, not managing the services. Why not let Safe and WeoGeo worry about all that and focus on the things that make us enjoy being GIS professionals?
Is the cloud a buzz word? Considering Amazon considers it their product (the second C in EC2), I’d fall on the side of no. Call it cloud computing, grid computing, whatever.
And I don’t know about you, but I’m desperate for something that gives me the power of a server product, but sells it as a service. Lets think of the ESRI world for a second. Maybe I use Network Analyst twice a year. I either pay for it and it sits there and 363 days a year doing nothing, or I don’t pay for it and I work around it. I would wager ESRI would make more money offering Network Analyst as a service you can use in ArcToolbox than they would by selling maintenance on it. More people would be apt to us it and thus more revenue to ESRI.
6
Roland
// Jul 19, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Hi James -
Are you going to the ESRI conference in San Diego August 2nd?
They will probably be showcasing this new software there.
They expect a crowd of 12,000 - Do you know if anyone else is going?
I found it listed here
Convention Center
7
James Fee
// Jul 20, 2008 at 9:25 am
I am not going. My son’s first day of Kindergarten is that Monday and I’m not missing that. August just doesn’t work for me for conferences.
The future looks better where mid July seems to be the “standard”. http://blogs.esri.com/Info/blogs/ucblog/archive/2008/01/31/future-conference-dates.aspx
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