OGC: user-mediated technology drives vendor opportunity

A market can be made more open, more active, and more responsive to buyers and sellers if it is made more organized. The Open GIS Consortium offers a model for organizing business in rapidly advancing technology markets. “Information Communities,” groups of users with common needs, can inject requirements into an open technical committee process that produces a specification for an open interface that gives users access to diverse technologies (and related data) from all compliant vendors. OGC has used this approach to solve the long-standing noninteroperability problems in an industry characterized by exceptionally complex and heterogeneous data and processing systems. Vendors are attracted to the process not only by the promise of market growth, based on the synergy of interoperability and today's burgeoning network computing environment, but also by OGC's aggressive business development programs. OGC has the potential to expand beyond geoprocessing because “repurposing” an exiting consortium with an effective technology-independent specification process is less expensive and risky than creating a new consortium, particularly if a critical mass of interested vendors and powerful and needy users are already members.