MORE ON XMARC AND ISIS

By Adena Schutzberg, from the February 7, 2002, GIS Monitor by TenLinks

Last week I examined the recent agreement between ISIS, parent of Plangraphics, and Xmarc. ISIS now has the exclusive license for Xmarc’s technology for use in the US in the local government and utilities sector. In return, ISIS will support existing customers and pay a royalty for 21 months. After that, ISIS will have an opportunity to own the technology outright.

John C. Antenucci, CEO and President of ISIS/Plangraphics, provides his vision of the relationship. “I do not share your concern that Xmarc's technology or the company is in peril. In fact the decision to align the support for North American customers and VARS with PlanGraphics allows Xmarc to focus on the European market for Wireless Location Based Services - where the market is more advanced (because of GSM standard) and addressable. Furthermore, the return of its technology development activities to Australia (from whence it came) allows the development and extension of the core technology to be developed at investment levels substantially lower than could be sustained in Europe or the US.

“All in all, the move by Xmarc was done with every effort to enhance and expand the distribution of the technology for enterprise solutions much like the one we are involved with for the State of Oregon.”

I asked Antenucci about what I considered a potential conflict of interest for an independent consultant like Plangraphics having this type of relationship with a software vendor. “I do not believe that having access to a set of integration tools makes PlanGraphics any less independent in the GIS space than it has ever been.

“This is not Convergent buying GDS. No one alleges we are any less independent because we use and deliver solutions built around Oracle Forms or Oracle spatial. Through the agreement with Xmarc we have available to us a set of code that we can use in building customer specific solutions.

“PlanGraphics does and will continue to work with other technologies in this ‘space.’ We define the space to be Enterprise access to spatially enabled data warehouses and repositories (both physical and virtual) using industry standard browsers.

“There really aren't many players in this space. Traditional suppliers of GIS software like ESRI, MapInfo, Smallworld and Intergraph among others provide only a portion of this solution. ESRI is one of the subcontractors (as was Xmarc) in the proof of concept we are performing for the State of Oregon and they have been collaborators on several other proposals that included Xmarc technology. MapInfo and PlanGraphics are examining a particular wireless solution at this time and there is an assignment in New York that will likely involve GE Smallworld's solution.

“However, the traditional GIS products do not have the enterprise ‘penetration’ that Netscape or Explorer do - and the Xmarc tool set will allow us to build solutions that rely on the data sets built with, maintained, and used by the traditional GIS suppliers and push this data to more users within the enterprise. As a result, we believe more individuals (and organizational units) will become familiar with the value of spatial and will likely become the next customer for the traditional GIS suppliers.”