The ESRI User Conference is by far the largest GIS related conference in the world. Every summer, GIS Users descend on The Gaslamp District of San Diego. The estimates for 2017 clocked in around 20,000 GIS Users attended. With this being the largest conference, it simply can’t be ignored in the greater “Future of GIS” tech series we’re doing here. The focus here is on ESRI tech, and a far more holistic look at the field of GIS opposed to a Spatial Technology conference.
As this is an ESRI sponsored conference, we’re going to assume all the tech is ESRI based. So the analysis in this is going to be the branches of that technology, and see how it mashes up with the trends we discovered in the blog of the Dev Summit and FOSS4G.
In addition, we’ll look at ESRI v/ ESRI tech. ArcGIS Pro mentions verse ArcGIS Desktop/Map and ArcGIS Server verse ArcGIS Online.
ZOOOOOMMMmmmmm……..
Analysis:
So, the PDF for the ESRI UC was well over 700 pages. Like the other analysis, I used KNIME to mine out specific TECHNICAL GIS terms. Since the UC is a GIS Wide event,there were a bunch of things mentioned which weren’t technical.
If you’re interested in that, lets just say the ESRI is an Emergency Management Software company with a Focus on GIS
As such, there are wide swaths of technology that ESRI still supports, and are still used out there, but aren’t “new” or “dynamic” but they are part of this analysis.
Also as with the others, some categories have been merged — Drone and UAVs, Python, ArcPY and Juniper Notebooks and lastly the mobile goulash that is Collector, Mobile, Android and iOS
Much like FOSS4G, 3D comes in with the most mentions of GIS technology. I’m not surprised by this, ESRI has been working HARD to usable web based 3D for years. It seems that they finally broke through.
Python coming in second. Again, not a surprise. ESRI has double down on Python as the lingua franca of GIS coding within their ecosystem. Even though they are member of the R Consortium. (R came in like 35th in mentions).
Mobile/Collector coming in third. Again, not a shock, since there is a bunch of field collectors who go to the UC, mobile GIS and data collection is a big deal.
Number four is shocking, so shocking I went back through and made sure they were mentioning the language and not some else. C, the C language. There are a number of legacy applications that use C in Desktop. Over the next few years this should slowly fall away.
<narrator> That was foreshadowing
Geodatabase rounding out the top 5. Again not a big surprise, since that is their core method for storing Geodata. Weird thing, shapefile is only mentioned like 10 times.
Drones coming in at number 6 the only thing shocking about their rank is I thought Drones might be higher, like 3 or 4.
Big Data, ranking at 7. Now, Big Data is mentioned 82 times, but NoSQL isn’t mentioned and Machine Learning was only mentioned once. Seems that they are targeting this for Managers.
CAD at 8. CAD. at. 8.
Javascript coming in at 9, but CAD is at 8.
Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Not my monkeys, not my circus
Rounding out the top ten is the GeoEvent Server. Which I didn’t put into the filter for ESRI products because, well I forgot it existed. But this does play back into the whole ESRI is an Emergency Management Software Company.
None of this is shocking, well except for CAD. Next the interesting, if you’re tied to the ESRI ecosystem, results.
E S R I vs EZEREE:
The big question, at least according to twitter, was what was going to happen to Desktop verse ArcGIS Pro. From twitter, it seems that the ESRI reps calmed the fears of those users that don’t want to lose Desktop, and hope for continued support. Of course, looking at the mentions within the conference document, the story is a tad different.
Basically a 5 to 1 ratio
With this data, I decided to look at the difference between ArcGIS Server verse ArcGIS Online
Again 5 to 1 ration
I’m not a user of ESRI products, but if I were, this would be the writing on the wall.
Errata:
The lack of Docker, PostGIS and Serverless shouldn’t be surprising since its an ESRI conference. PostGres was mentioned a handful of times, but not utilizing the native Spatial SQL.
Lastly, let’s look at Arcade. That language that ESRI developed for, some reason. I’ve been told by ESRI employees, that it’s mentioned in sessions, but not mentioned in text describing the sessions. Well, thats fine, but this is actual hard data, and not word of mouth or hearsay. So I decided to compare how many times Arcade was mentioned verse my pal Marten Hogeweg.
Both mentioned 5 times.
Conclusion:
Those of you in this ecosystem can look at see where ESRI is, and what their priorities are. So brush up on your Python, AGOL and ArcGIS Pro skills. The lack of a discussion of Machine Learning, or methodologies for large datasets, and while IoT was mentioned, it did crack the top 20. Also, I was hoping for more support for Insights. Well, there is always next year.
Lastly, as this is the third and expected final part of this series, I’m going to add another entry. The FOSS4G Europe conference looked amazing, so I’m going to add that on. You know, for balance.
