Open Spatial Solutions formally launched itself as a spatial technology applications house last month to an audience of some 150 invited guests from a broad cross-section of industries.

Open Spatial supplies and implements a wide range of intranet and Internet-based spatial solutions to the spatial information market, based on world-leading GIS technologies such as Autodesk, ESRI and MapInfo, and databases such as Oracle. The four-month-old company is an offshoot of fellow M-Squared company, MunSys Technologies, developers of the multiple-award-winning MynSys suite of spatial software for local government and utilities.

Open Spatial is a trendsetter towards Geographic Information Systems (GIS) companies offering a variety of spatial applications for vertical markets, as opposed to their historically project-based approach. The timeliness of the company's offering is confirmed, among others, by Craig Yeatman, Managing Director of WorldsView Technologies, Autodesk's distributor in South Africa.

In the company's newsletter to its channel, Yeatman praised not only the organisation of the event, but also Open Spatial's solutions-based orientation towards spatial technology. "It was wonderful to see a GIS partner who had crossed over from being a pure project house, and had started to talk about some applications," he said.

Martiens Pelser, Managing Director of Open Spatial, comments: "We were extremely pleased with the response to our launch. Many attendees were surprised to know that such a wide range of GIS platforms were available from any one vendor, and that they are used in various, flexible combinations to create a range of solutions".

Pelser adds: "Unlike older vendors, we do not carry any baggage. We are free to take the best GIS technology the market has to offer and draw it into the next phase, by packaging it into an array of applications that can rapidly yield benefits in the environments they manage. This is the way the market will move, in line with the growing demand for a quickly deployable spatial component to management information systems".

Open Spatial Solutions

(011) 783 1834

nchapman@openspatial.co.za