India: Esri India and MapmyIndia have announced a strategic partnership, collaborating to offer cutting edge GIS solutions along with rich map data to enterprise and Government customers.
Speaking at Esri India User Meet 2013 in New Delhi, Arvind Thakur, CEO, Esri India said that GIS helps us understand the world challenges through visual enablement. GIS is now getting integrated with mainstream technologies which is driving usage. Internet has been one of the paradigm shifters so far, now the biggest explosion in usage will come with integration of content and platform. Such an integration, as brought about through the partnership of Esri india and MapmyIndia, will enlarge the community of developers to create applications, raise the level of decision making in respective organisations, and help develop solutions that will help governance.
Rakesh Verma, co-founder, MapmyIndia, said that users have always required maps to do better planning. From being available in print format, the maps moved to digital format followed by the web technology which changed the paradigm. Partnership with Esri India is step ahead in the technological evolution with the availability of this content on a robust integrated platform, enabling users better leverage the maps.
He further added that “our collaboration with Esri India is not just a win-win situation for us but also for the users which includes corporates, governments and individuals. This powerful platform will equip them with GIS capabilities and comprehensive map data thereby increasing efficiency and productivity. I see this alliance blending India’s best maps and world’s best GIS technology, as having a strong enabling impact on the way and the scale of GIS usage in India.”
Emphasizing on the productisation of maps, Verma said that productised maps are critical for users to build their applications to satisfy their needs. Product release means that maps are live, that they are not gathering dust. This will ensure their utility. Productising maps is not a small thing, he said.
As National GIS comes to the fore, he urged not to build national GIS maps from a scratch, but use whatever has been built. With people identity and location identity, e-governance can become very transparent. He stressed that every user can take advantage of this platform (the result of this partnership), and government departments can share maps with each other.
This platform is custom made for the Indian environment. MapmyIndia maps will now be available through Esri’s ArcGIS Online (AGOL), a cloud based GIS platform that can be readily adopted as the mapping platform of choice by organizations. As part of this association MapmyIndia will also become an authorized value added reseller for Esri’s GIS Software products which will be bundled with MapmyIndia Maps.
Source: Our Correspondent
