OpenGeo

In June, OpenGeo announced our initial partnership with Spatialytics in Canada. Today, we are launching the official OpenGeo Partner Program, our new, international network of service providers. We are aiming to bring more people into the open source ecosystem by aligning the financial incentives of consultants and solution providers with those of core software developers. Through our partner network, OpenGeo will offer OpenGeo Suite clients a wealth of proven technology solutions that solve real-world challenges.

There has been great interest in the OpenGeo Suite from around the world since its launch almost a year ago, from end users and solutions providers alike. We feel that the best way to foster greater access to the OpenGeo Suite is in collaboration with organizations that share our values and offer outstanding solutions expertise to end users. Our Partner Program will expand the capabilities of these solutions providers by giving them a complete, certified, and fully supported open source geospatial stack backed by core experts on PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache, OpenLayers and GeoExt.

Read more about our Partner Program.

OpenGeo managers and technical staff will be in attendance at FOSS4G, the leading conference for open source geospatial software, in Barcelona, Spain, September 6 – 9, 2010. Stop by booth #15 if you are interested in discussing partnerships and plans for the OpenGeo Suite.

As in past years, OpenGeo is participating in the annual WMS benchmarking exercise that OSGeo sponsors. The exercise is a great opportunity for development teams to learn about where their project needs to concentrate development effect to make things faster and more compliant in the next year. Our coordinator this year (as in the past couple years) is Andrea Aime, who is working hard on both making sure GeoServer is properly configured for the tests, and is providing JMeter expertise to the entire exercise. The results of the benchmarking will be presented at FOSS4G 2010 next month.

In previous years, the exercise has been just MapServer versus GeoServer, and both projects have learned a lot in the process. Last year ESRI joined the process, but unfortunately ran out of staff time before the results were complete. This year the participation has exploded! The final number of teams that complete the testing might be smaller, but as it stands now the participants include: MapServer, GeoServer, CadCorp GeognoSIS, Constellation SDI, ERDAS Apollo, Mapnik, Oracle MapViewer, and QGIS mapserver.

As the participants get their servers online and configured to use identical data and styles, it becomes possible to compare their results visually. To make the comparison a little more dynamic, I wrote a small multi-map page that uses OpenLayers to view all the servers at once, looking at the same area.

It’s really fun to see so many different implementations chew up the same data and styles and spit out the same map. Standards work? Standards work!

We all know that FOSS4G is the greatest conference of its kind of the entire calendar. Those of you who were able to make it to Sydney, Cape Town, Victoria, Lausanne or any of the other previous conferences surely know this. But FOSS4G is not just about location (there may be a pun in there), it’s also a great place to learn about new software, improve at old ones, and meet people who you previous might have known only as an email address.

This year will be no different. And OpenGeo will be descending upon Barcelona en masse.

As you may know, the first day of FOSS4G is devoted to workshops – long form, hands-on sessions where you learn the tools you need to make your work awesome. This year, we are leading or co-leading four workshops:

• Web Mapping with GeoServer
• Web Mapping with OpenLayers
• Introduction to PostGIS
• Geospatial for Java

With the exception of the last one, these are all introductory courses, designed for those who want a flavor of these tools and to see what they can do.

We don’t want to bribe you, but for our PostGIS, GeoServer and OpenLayers workshop attendees, we will be giving away t-shirts emblazoned with the software logo. Not only does this mean that you can now go one more day before doing laundry, but you can show your true colors, your PostGIS blue, your GeoServer green, or your OpenLayers, um, teal, I think.

There are just a few slots left for each workshop, so you want to register now.

And don’t just come for the workshops, we’ll be leading or co-leading tutorials and presentations too:

• Building Web Based GIS Applications with GeoExt
• SDI best practices with GeoNode
• The State of PostGIS
• Tips for the PostGIS Power User
• GeoServer CSS: Mapping in Style
• GeoNode Architecture: Wrangling $100 million worth of open source software to make SDI building a walk in the park
• Mobile Augmented Reality using FOSS
• GeoServer WPS: an integrated, extensible processing service
• GeoServer cartographic rendering: new features for map makers
• Graphical style editing with Styler: Make a basemap without seeing SLD
• Web Map Printing with GeoExt
• Performance Considerations In OpenLayers Based Web Mapping
• OpenLayers’ Future

And, of course, don’t forget the yearly WMS Performance Shootout.

You haven’t registered yet?

In addition to all of this, we’ll be at our booth, listening and talking, learning and teaching, and helping to make this year’s event as good as it can be. Come say “hi”. We’ll be easy to spot, as we’ll be wearing the t-shirts too (we got extras for ourselves).

If you missed attending FOSS4G, you can now experience a part of the conference via videos! Here are the talks that we gave that were captured by the video team from FOSSLC:

• Geoserver: Past, Present and Future [0, 1]
• The State of PostGIS
• Styling with SLD
• Geoserver In Production
• WMS Performance Shootout
• OpenLayers Vector Mayhem
• Beyond Nerds Bearing Gifts [1, 2, 3]

Happy viewing!

I hope it was no surprise that my keynote at FOSS4G this week was partly about open source business models and the whole product, because that’s what I’ve been thinking about (and to an extent, blogging about here) for the last six months or so.

And the good news (to me) is that the concept appears to be striking a chord among right folks: managers and system integrators. We are getting lots of good feedback at the booth from those folks in addition to the regular stream of highly technical folks who are happy to chew the fat with our team of core developers.

On the business side, I think the system integrators are the really important ones. They can move from coming to clients with three or four different projects pulled from different places with different support options to coming in with just one infrastructure piece, the OpenGeo Suite. And on top of that, they can make use of the facilities of GeoServer and GeoExt to build nice tightly focussed business apps. The sales proposition for them with conservative customers gets a lot cleaner: the business app the client wants plus a single infrastructure piece with simple support story.

I have also been hearing tales of woe about the local distributors for the Leading Brand elbowing out independents for services work, which will seed a nice collection of disgruntled folks looking for an alternative.

So the challenge comes back to us: execute, execute, execute, on the technical side of polishing the Suite into a whole product worthy of the mainstream market, and on the business side signing up local partners to carry the message forward.