OpenGeo

Not as exciting as our first kiss, but still pretty exciting: our first OpenGeo re-seller is Spatialytics in Quebec. That means that users of the OpenGeo Suite in Quebec will be able to receive front-line support from local staff who (importantly) speak French (with the right accent)!

We expect resellers to form the backbone of the ecosystem around the OpenGeo Suite. In a world with 40 time zones and hundreds of languages there is no way one organization can be everywhere. We want to focus as much of our internal effort as possible on improving the Suite, the core Suite projects, and the learning materials that go with them. Partners will be the bridge between our core team and customers around the world.

Welcome Spatialytics, to the OpenGeo family!

(Want to explore becoming a re-seller? Drop us a line, inquiry at opengeo dot org.)

Mmmmmmm, market sandwich...

When describing the OpenGeo Suite, I am often asked one of two questions (depending on who I am talking to): “why not just use ESRI” or “why not just use Google”.

The answer to the first question depends on the person asking, ranging from the “ability to economically scale out to larger user loads” to more managerial things like “having multi-vendor options and flexibility in tool choice”.

The answer to the second question is was the subject of a recent article in Ovum, which notes:

The key exposures for agencies using the free map platforms relate to some natural consequences of the services being provided for free. These include:

• lack of assurances regarding the continuous provision or reliability of the service or that it will remain available for free in the future
• lack of control over the content displayed by the vendors on the platform – particularly advertisements
• lack of control over how the vendors use data that is provided by agencies
• the requirement to indemnify the vendors from any claims arising from the agency’s use of the service.

The market runs from the cloud-based web services (Google, Bing) through to self-managed proprietary (ESRI), and there is a gap in the middle where customers need the flexibility and scalability of the consumer services married with the feature richness and control of self-managed software.

And that gap, in the middle of the “market sandwich”, is where we plant our flag.

OpenGeo is in the market for people who know the market… specifically a Director of Marketing and a Sales Executive.  Over the past year we have thought a lot about what it means to build a business on open source, and created a product which we think is a useful addition to the geospatial world.

But we don’t want to throw a party and have nobody show up! So we need to get the word out, beyond the fairly small population of people who might read a blog post like this one, out to the many developers and organizations who are building geospatial applications.  The Director of Marketing will be focused on generating leads and building a system for qualifying those leads as efficiently as possible. The Sales Executive will help to turn those leads into sales, hunt for new leads, and assist us in fielding our current opportunities more efficiently.

If you know someone, or are someone, who wants to be a part of a social enterprise devoted to making open source geospatial tools widely available and used, we hope to talk to you soon!

Update: We’re here! Look for Paul Ramsey and Sophia Parafina on stage at Ignite on Tuesday. Paul will also be at the OSGeo booth intermittently throughout the event!

I’m looking forward to this year’s Where 2.0 in San Jose coming up in three weeks! Where is always a different mix of folks from a usual GIS show, and the Silicon Valley vibe is something you can only get… well, in Silicon Valley.  I am going to be teaching a workshop with Steve Citron-Pousty on the open source geospatial stack, using our own OpenGeo Suite for a big part of the software we show.

If you’re coming to Where 2.0 and want to talk about OpenGeo in general or PostGIS in particular, please let me know! Either drop me an email or hit my Where 2.0 profile.

As egregious as this self-horn-tooting is, I have to post about how enjoyable I have found using the OpenGeo Suite. It might sound odd, coming from an OpenGeo person, to “discover” the Suite at this late date but my personal reality is that I spend much of my time with PostGIS, and until recently only did short testing passes over the Suite.

But this last week, I have been revising a workshop that I will be giving with Steven Citron-Pousty at Where 2.0 this month, possibly at GeoWeb in the summer (and on my own at the Minnesota GIS/LIS conference in the fall). And included in that revision is using the OpenGeo Suite instead of vanilla GeoServer.

Among the things I’ve really enjoyed are:

• How easy the install process is. No messing around installing JDKs or JAI extension libraries.
• How clean the new UI is. Much more sensible names for things and less clicky workflow.
• The instant gratification of the Suite tools. Installer creates datastore and layers and associated styles in one go. Styler writes new SLD with a click click click.
• The little On/Off button in the Dashboard. For some reason I really like that.

The net effect of all the cleanups is I’ve removed about 6 screens of configuration boilerplate from the workshop. More time to talk concepts and scare the students with JavaScript examples!

GEOS, the geometry engine underneath the PostGIS spatial database (part of the OpenGeo Suite), has achieved a version 3.2.0 release! The latest release includes performance improvements in buffering, general C++ performance improvements, and an implementation of single-sided buffering. PostGIS users who upgrade their GEOS will get all the performance improvements automatically. The upcoming release of PostGIS 1.5 (about which we are very excited) will also tie in support for the new single-sided buffers.

We want to make it as easy as possible for anyone to download and try out the OpenGeo Suite. A few months ago, we put together a LiveDisk, a bootable DVD image containing all of the software preconfigured. However, we recognize that a sandbox environment like that is only worthwhile as a first step. “That looks great,” I’ve heard, “but how do I get it on my machine?”

To this end, we have started work on the OpenGeo Suite Installer. This is an integrated package that installs and configures the OpenGeo Suite on your system. It makes the process of evaluating our software easy, within the familiarity of your own system.

We have a preliminary release available for you to try. The package contains the following:

• GeoServer (plus documentation)
• GeoServer Data Importer (an automated shapefile importer)
• GeoExplorer (plus documentation)
• Getting Started Guide

We have lots of plans for this project in the very near future, including integrated plugin support for GeoServer, GeoBuilder (which will combine graphical styling, map composition, and map export all in one), PostGIS support, and much else. Currently, the OpenGeo Suite installer is available for Windows only, but we anticipate adding support for other operating systems soon.

Give it a try, and let us know what you think.