Tutorial: How does geoinformatics business work?
The tutorial aims at presenting the major characteristics, driving forces and interdependencies of businesses which develop their selling proposition on and around mature GIS technology and recent achievements made in geoinformatics. The starting point will be a disaggregation of the market into vertical value chains including COTS software vendors (both proprietary software and FOSS), distributors, integrators, application developers and consultancies. This exercise will result in the identification of top dogs in the marketplace including their success strategies. But the main objective of the tutorial is to reveal promising market niches for entrepreneurs and to discuss related opportunities and threats. A particular attention will be given to businesses which gather (or may do so in the future) around SOA/ESB and contribute to the convergence of geospatial information and mainstream IT in various industry sectors and enterprise application domains.
COTS commercial off the shelf (software) ESB enterprise service bus FOSS free and open source software GI geospatial information system IT information technology SOA service oriented architecture
