This week OpenGeo took an exciting and important step forward as an organization. We’ve taken on investment and spun out from OpenPlans, our long time parent organization, to establish ourselves as an independent company. Our growth and this successful step out on our own are the result of our amazing team and the success of open source geospatial software that we’ve been working on for over ten years.

Vanedge Capital, a Vancouver-based venture capital firm, led the Series A round of investment that made this possible. We are truly excited to begin a partnership with Vanedge, an innovative fund led by partners who know how to grow and manage software technology companies.

This investment provides the capital we need to meet our objectives and continue to develop innovative technologies. If you’re a regular reader of this blog or have seen us lately at conferences or events, you know about the ambitious projects we’ve been working on: through-the-web-processing, breaking out of the GIS work-flow with Spatial IT, geospatial web-analytics and distributed versioning for geospatial – to name a few. This type of development requires not just the strong technical skills and forward-looking leadership that our team has, but it also requires resources, which Vanedge’s investment provides.

This investment also allows us to achieve our long-planned separation from OpenPlans, which founded and incubated us. We are grateful for the support and vision of OpenPlans over the years. And, since OpenPlans remains an investor in our new company, we’re looking forward to our continued partnership with them.

Our mission remains the same: to build the highest quality software for location and mapping, available to all. This investment gives us a stronger base of resources to support the open source communities we work with. We remain committed to the open source principles of collaboration, transparency, and freedom. We’ll be doing even more to develop the best geospatial tools while supporting the open source communities and our customers alike.

Look for more from us about the future of Spatial IT and how we can help you get there.

Find out more about this important step forward and please contact us if you have any questions.

This month, coincident with the release of the OpenGeo Suite 3.0, OpenGeo staff will be writing about the value of commercial open source, what it means to be open, and how OpenGeo is directing its efforts to increase the functionality and utility of open source geospatial software. We begin with this post, and a white paper exploring The Value of the OpenGeo Suite.

I was recently in a meeting with a customer where, despite a great pilot deployment of the OpenGeo Suite, little progress was being made to use the Suite to replace an untenable dependence on closed source software. This enterprise (along with many others) was literally in a hole and couldn’t get out. Today, many organizations are finding that they need to deploy more, and better geospatial web services, but are faced with shrinking budgets. Additionally,  they are often hampered with closed source software, raising the spectre of rising license costs as data and service volumes grow.

We want to help these organizations  and set the record straight about the comparative value of the various web mapping offerings available:

• Closed source
• Open source (unsupported)
• Commercial open source (supported)

The OpenGeo Suite provides enterprises with an immediate opportunity to stop digging and climb out of this hole. The upcoming 3.0 release adds significant functional power to OpenGeo’s considerable advantages in reliability, scalability, costs and control. Historically geospatial web services have been dominated by a single closed source provider, but in recent years open source alternatives have been cutting into this lead. The OpenGeo Suite 3.0, offers advantages beyond unsupported open source, and can provide enterprises with superior value in delivering geospatial web services, while simultaneously increasing the reach and functionality of enterprise systems and controlling costs.

Learn more about how commercial open source can increase web making capabilities while minimizing costs: The Value of the OpenGeo Suite.

Last week brought big news for two companies we closely track:  GeoIQ and GitHub.

Esri deserves a big congratulations for snapping up one of the most innovative teams in the geospatial arena. Sean Gorman and Andrew Turner are both strong voices in our community and we hope their presence within Esri will accelerate the pace towards more open formats and software.

GeoIQ and GeoCommons has been a source of inspiration to us, showing us how to make spatial information more relevant to a wider audience by recreating many traditional GIS workflows on the web. We also look to companies like GitHub that are focused on leveraging the strengths of the web to develop new workflows and methods of collaboration.

OpenGeo isn’t just trying to recreate desktop GIS on the web; we’re injecting “spatial” into the broader IT ecosystem. Those of you that have seen Paul Ramsey’s “Spatial IT on the Spatial Web” talk from FOSS4G North America know that OpenGeo is moving beyond GIS. We aim to continue and extend the path that GeoIQ has shown, offering continued choice and innovation in the geospatial market.

So another story that caught our attention — but that did not get as much notice in our industry press — was that GitHub has just received a $100 million investment from Andreesen Horowitz.  Since its inception in 2007, GitHub has been a truly innovative open source company, building success from the ground up through a dedication to open source software and communities.  We see GitHub’s success to be the result of the convergence of very important attributes that we seek to mirror, including:

• A strong team — similarly, OpenGeo employs leading experts in open source geospatial
• Robust technology — the OpenGeo Suite is a powerful stack of software that is flexible enough to meet the needs of many different industries
• A deep understanding of, and a commitment to open source communities – OpenGeo supports FOSS4G, community code sprints, and projects such as GeoServer, PostGIS, and OpenLayers

What GitHub understands is that open source is more than a license; it is a culture, a new way of operating. GitHub not only releases as much code as it can as open source software, it also is pioneering innovative business models to build products that enable more open source collaboration for all.

While closed source companies continue to follow strategies that reduce software options, our focus continues to be on increasing diversity and choice by fostering open source communities and building tools that enable greater collaboration — all while simultaneously standing behind what we consider the best geospatial technology out there, the OpenGeo Suite.

If you use desktop GIS software, you’ve probably been keeping an eye on the proliferation of web-based GIS. Perhaps you’ve even wanted to get involved but have been reluctant to migrate away from familiar tools. Well, you’re in luck! Our partner, GeoCat, has recently released GeoCat Bridge, an extension to ArcMap that allows users to publish their data using the OpenGeo Suite simply and easily.

With GeoCat Bridge, you can continue to use all of the tools provided by Esri to style and edit maps on your desktop and then use Bridge to publish the contents to the OpenGeo Suite. Bridge handles the data loading as well as the conversion of style information to Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD), the markup language used for styling within the OpenGeo Suite.

It’s a great day for users of desktop GIS software—call it a bridge to the future.

Learn more about GeoCat Bridge and the OpenGeo Suite

The GeoNode community recently welcomed the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University (CGA) to its growing community of institutional participants. CGA has announced that it is incorporating GeoNode components into its WorldMap web mapping system, with an eye towards stronger user collaboration and better tools for data management and editing.

From the GeoNode site:

CGA was committed to building WorldMap using open source technologies. While supporting user roles and collaboration requires major development efforts, CGA was able to quickly achieve results thanks to WorldMap’s open source, interoperable architecture. By working with OpenGeo to use GeoNode as the basis for new capabilities, CGA received immediate access to key open source components supporting collaboration, mapping, metadata management, and more

While OpenGeo remains firmly committed to developing GeoNode, the number of contributors is swelling far beyond OpenGeo’s ranks. Along with OpenGeo and Harvard CGA, the GeoNode community now includes Global Earthquake Model Foundation (GEM), World Bank, and the Australia-Indonesia Facility for Disaster Reduction (AIFDR). With additional input comes a growth in users, testers, and developers, contributing to the overall sustainability of the project and benefiting all who use it.

Read more about this collaboration.

We are excited to announce that the OpenGeo Suite is now listed on the General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule! This contract award makes it far easier for US government purchasers to purchase the OpenGeo Suite and related support services.

Although OpenGeo has been working with US Government clients for some time now, this GSA contract has the ability to simplify purchases for all US government entities, enabling greater access of our software to many new potential users.

This award is especially important to us because providing services to government is directly in line with our mission to bring the best open source geospatial software to all organizations around the world. Starting with our own backyard, of course.

Contract details:
OpenGeo has received a Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) contract on the GSA Information Technology Schedule 70. Our contract number is GS-35F-0034X.

Our partner program continues to grow as Inovação joins us to provide sales and support of the OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition in Brazil. Inovação is a leader in the Brazilian market and serves customers in energy, utilities, mining, government, and telecommunications. They are also engaged with public and private organizations to implement the Brazilian national data model (MND) and other standards including ISO, APDM, and FGDC.

AfriSpatial, an expert GIS systems and services provider, and OpenGeo are teaming to bring the first Enterprise FOSS stack offering to the southern African market. AfriSpatial will be providing first line support for the OpenGeo Suite for end users in countries throughout southern Africa, with OpenGeo in turn providing support to AfriSpatial.

AfriSpatial is a pioneering SME in the southern African GIS community, with access to a large network of skilled local resources. Gavin Fleming from AfriSpatial also leads the local OSGeo Chapter and brought FOSS4G 2008 to South Africa. With the addition of the OpenGeo Suite to its offerings, AfriSpatial can now fill a major gap in the market—for those organizations needing the lower risk and powerful backing of an enterprise-class product.

An example of a current, local, high profile project using OpenGeo components where AfriSpatial is the lead geospatial contractor is Tracks4Africa, which uses PostGIS and OpenLayers.

We just received word from Ordnance Survey, Britain’s national mapping agency, that they have agreed to an OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition contract to support their ongoing spatial data infrastructure initiatives. The OS OnDemand service from Ordnance Survey has recently adopted GeoServer as its primary Web Map Service to customers and the OpenGeo Suite contract will fund core development work for all GeoServer deployments to meet INSPIRE View Service requirements, including WMS 1.3.

At the FOSS4G conference in Barcelona this past week we announced the availability of new OpenGeo training materials online, all of which are licensed under the Creative Commons Share-Alike With Attribution license. Introductory workshops on the PostGIS spatial database, OpenLayers web mapping library, and the GeoServer map and feature server are all available online at http://workshops.opengeo.org.

Watch this space and the usual geo news outlets as OpenGeo continues adding new workshops and advanced materials as we develop and present them.