Just listened to a great radio programme which talked about the Soviet Military efforts to map the UK in the Cold War. The BBC are streaming the programme here for the next week. The story was also picked up by The Times.
Here is an example of the type of mapping the Soviets produced for major cities, in this case a 1:10,000 map of Granton harbour in Edinburgh.
It seems that Blackpool Bus Station was a primary target !
So Autodesk makes other acquisition to add to its GIS portfolio, in this case C-PLAN the Swiss developer of municipal applications built on Oracle Spatial. In my time at Autodesk C-PLAN were an excellent partner in the German speaking parts of Europe, with very good solutions using Autodesk Map and MapGuide linked to a single corporate repository in Oracle.
So what now happens with the other big Autodesk technology acquisition, the Autodesk Design Server which came with VISION purchase – a product with now very little visibility in the market.
Acquisitions of technology companies is seldom easy, and Autodesk has not had the best record in the past few years – who remembers Autodesk World ? the product of Automated Methods (Pty) ltd an acquisition of now 10 years ago.
Why is it so difficult – well for Autodesk I think the issue has been and may still be the focus on Autocad based solutions, particularly in the Autodesk partner channel which makes the marketing and successful exploitation of something “different” difficult. With an established portfolio of products, the introduction of a new ‘alien” technology needs careful management to achieve sucessful integration – a very simple question needs to be answered – WHERE DOES IT FIT ?
Autodesk is not alone in suffering from this technology indigestion, but I wish them better luck this time.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
We are running a number of large Oracle Spatial projects at Ordnance Survey, which are part of our major investment programme to update key elements of our back office systems for managing our geodata.
This week it appeared that one of our Oracle contractors was to be pulled off the project to work elsewhere (you get used to this working with vendor contractors) – now this guy has really detailed knowledge of how Oracle Spatial works at the database level – he is one of that rare breed an Oracle Spatial DBA.
Now we have fortunately a very good strategic relationship with Oracle and we were able to get them to change their mind and the guy is still with us – but there is a deeper underlying problem here – where do you find skilled people who understand Oracle Spatial ?
There is a massive skills shortage in this area, Oracle itself has limited resources, there are a few independent consultants with some knowledge at a architectural level, but we really need people who understand the unique nuts and bolts of partitioning a spatial database !
And don’t rely of these people coming out of universities very few MSc courses seem to have caught up with the fact that increasing GIS is a corporate database activity, not a cartography specialism, and few courses expose they students to spatial database technology.
This really has to change !