GIS Becomes Mainstream

Good interview with the president of ESRI on the mainstreaming of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). I agree, much has changed and there is a bright future:

' .... There will be lots and lots of services available both inside the enterprise and on the open Web. We're already seeing this, and the services will be standards-based, open and interoperable and mash-able. People will orchestrate multiple services to support new applications, and this orchestration will include things like integrating ERP databases with maps or embedding maps inside of ERP applications using SOAP and traditional Web services architectures. Multiple kinds of data sets, map layers and database tables will be brought together dynamically in these lightweight applications as rich Internet applications ...'