Cloud computing is at the heart of WeoGeo and refers to hosting computing services offsite, sometimes with a "pay as you go" model. WeoGeo runs its application on Amazon's EC2 and S3 services. WeoGeo allows users to search, find and download geodata for use in various analytical and cartographic pursuits. The one thing missing: the ability to transform and deliver data in various formats. That's just some of what Safe Software's FME Server can do.
Safe Software announced FME Server this spring. It makes all the power of FME's extract, transform and load capabilities available to anyone who can access a Web page. The challenge for many potential users: hosting the server in-house.
This partnership will address both of these needs. The first phase of the partnership, which is targeted for the first quarter of 2009, will integrate FME Server into WeoGeo's data marketplace. That means data providers who participate in the marketplace can offer their data in any of the more than 200 formats Safe supports. It also means that users can be confident that any data they want to purchase via WeoGeo can be transformed in exactly the way they need for immediate use. In the second phase, WeoGeo will offer its expertise to enable deployment of FME Server in the cloud to serve clients who need that type of distributed, scalable solution.
I think these two companies are on to something. The cloud is becoming part of our daily lives - for e-mail, for Google Earth use, for calendars. It's time to put its reliability, scalability and offsite hardware management to the test in geospatial. I feel pretty confident everyone involved in geospatial is already using applications that run in the cloud and the number they use will only increase in the coming months and years.
A podcast interviewing Safe Software President Don Murray and WeoGeo CEO Paul Bissett fleshes out the details of the announcement and highlights their vision of cloud computing.