Thursday, February 15, 2007

Indian GIS data - bright future ahead !

On AUGTICS front, exciting time and smart & hard work continues. The real estate/community portal development is coming along nicely with the team doing exceptional job in not just coding but coming up with superb ideas. I continue to engage prospective clients, partners, investors and getting content and AUGTICS ready for website and portal launch!! I somehow stole some time to write this post...

Today morning, in my RSS Feedreader box, a specific news caught my attention: Mumbai Police Implement Intergraph Public Safety System . Years back, I had made a presentation to a group of over 20 high level police officials of an IT savvy southern Indian state and while they all were very excited about using GIS applications and saw enormous benefits in implementing it, non-availability of detailed mapping data became the show stopper. It appears that things are now changing..

Map World Forum was a good place to gauge the mood of the industry. Each and every person I met was extremely excited about how their companies are growing and about the future potential. That’s confirmed from the information from the publicly traded companies like Infotech and Rolta and quick ramp-up of a Hyderabad bases GIS start-up company Geospace Integra to close to 100 people mark within the first year of inception!! Most of this growth is driven by outsourcing, but there is a lot happing around in India, which, in future, is likely to change the Indian GIS scenario significantly! Let’s take a different view...

Recently I logged on to ORKUT to learn a bit about how community and networking portals work (I need some of that knowledge for AUGTICS). To my surprise I found several GIS related communities. Here are some interesting tit-bits that I found from ORKUT:

  • There are over 20 GIS communities on ORKUT and the biggest community has over 1300 members with more than 90% from India!
  • My search for people above 30 years of age in the GIS word retuned just 20 (and for above 35 only 4) people from the list of thousands!
  • There are ORKUT communities of companies like Infotech, RMSI, Rolta etc and that posts on them can give you some insight on the company cultures.
  • From the various posts. I quickly assimilated a list of over 60 companies working in GIS arena. List indicates that all the major SW companies (Infosys, Wipro, Satyam etc, apart from TCS) have their own GIS staff /divisions.
  • IBM India is working on AutoDesks Mapguide (?!)
  • Collage students are developing digital maps of India at Google Hyderabad office!
In the last few days these were the two news of that are worth taking note of (click on the links to read more)

From other sources, I also learned that:

  • Indian government is planning a massive GIS mapping budget that will far exceed the current SOI budget
  • Navteq is developing India street navigation data
  • Microsoft also has plans for India data development.
I also recently visited mapmyindia site and it's heartening to see increased data on this site.

So can we find a trend from this? Yes, at least one- there is focus on the Indian data development!!!

In the coming days, with government and industry initiative, we can expect a lot of data to come in public domain or be available from private sources at a reasonable cost. This will act as a fuel for growth of GIS applications in India. A growth where India focused applications impacting the masses will be developed, where applications will be developed to solve the Indian consumer problems. A growth that will only be limited by our imagination, innovations or availability of trained manpower!

It will not be a surprise if data availability acts as a catalyst for more and more international players to come and focus on Indian GIS market to sell their concepts and products! So, an exciting time lies ahead for the Indian GIS industry!!

Manoj Misra

PS:
1. Thanks you for posting comments as well as your direct emails and SMSs to me. Keep writing and sending your feedback. It's helpful and really appreciated.

2. Apart from the data development activities, there are significant developments happening on the Product Development, Remote Sensing and software application development in the Indian GIS market. Stay tuned to hear more!

3. Yogendran @ IIC has done a wonderful analysis of GIS industry in 2000. The report is at GIS Lounge and it still makes an interesting read!!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Manoj,

Thanks for the information and also previous articles.
Good collection.
Keep up the good work and hope wonderful time ahead.

Regards,
Shiva

Manoj Misra said...

Thanks Siva: It will be great to know your views and comments the data related issues and market in India. So do leave the comments next time you are around..

Regards,

Manoj

Anonymous said...

Hello ,

a few thoughts/queures,

a)did you check how many people above >30 and >35 are members in ORKUT. This will leave a lot to decide.

b) Navteq and MS collecting indian data. Really interesting... Can you please share with us the source and how these companies collect data... I found in Google maps blog data is available but not how they did it.

c) I replied to your mail about indian GIS Industry, since I didnt want to post it here.

Carl

Manoj Misra said...

Hello Carl:

a) I did search for >30 and >35 only for GIS users! Clearly the trend is that majority of the people on ORKUT <=30. The point that I wanted to bring out that a lot of young Indian GIS professionals are hooked to web (and their number is far more than any other international community.

b)Can't confirm on the approach or methodology. If I come across credible source of information, I will pass it to you.

c) For some reason, I have not received your earlier email. Please re-send it.

Manoj

Anonymous said...

Dear Manoj,

I have to make a studie market about the GIS in India. I have one week for answers many questions.
But my questions is who is the GIS leader in India ? Because I try and I find anything, in fact every GIS company pretend to be the leader.
So please could you bring me who is the GIS leader in India and say me also is the GIS market in India is big or little ?
I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards,

Julie

Photogrammetry services said...

Dear Manoj
Can you tell the the scope of GIS project and technology in India during recession period..Articles are good. Thanks for sharing informations..
regards
SBL
GIS spatial analysis

sravan said...

Hi Manoj,

Wat u telling is good!!!!!!
i have a doubt like i done my BTECH with ECE stream and i have job for GOOGLE GIS position hyd .....shud i opt it and start my carrer in that ...
how it will be after few years

sravan said...

Hi Manoj,

Wat u telling is good!!!!!!
i have a doubt like i done my BTECH with ECE stream and i have job for GOOGLE GIS position hyd .....shud i opt it and start my carrer in that ...
how it will be after few years

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