In the past, many clients would specify “all ESRI/COTS” (Commercial Off The Shelf) solutions, and were not particularly interested in intermingling open-source components. However, I believe the current financial down-turn may make hybrid solutions the pragmatic choice. Many organizations who may have been leery of brining in PostGres/PostGIS, may now be open to the idea because budgets are frozen and there is simply no way they will get funding for another Internet connected COTS DBMS license (which runs $5,000 per CPU for SQL Server).
Organizations who already have ArcGIS Server licenses, may be inclined to “save” the ArcGIS Server system for heavy-lifting spatial operations, and use GeoServer or MapServer for creating dynamic map layers/tile caches, and custom services for things in-between (i.e. mark-up type editing or spatial based reporting). Since ESRI now supports maintaining data in a native spatial format on all the major databases (with “SDE” in the mix), it’s now viable to use the ESRI desktop tools for daily spatial data management, while also building out a mixed environment for servicing GeoWeb applications.
The following diagram shows a very generic architecture that I think will become much more common over the next year.
This approach leverages the best features of all the software packages, while also optimizing the use of expensive, CPU-bound licenses.
How hybrid is your system? What’s holding you back?
