I think Sean's back of the envelope stuff is pretty good in terms of broad estimates.
Sean, I didn't see the $800m revenue number or 31% market share on the ESRI link there ... where did those come from? It's always hard doing these types of analyses (what counts as "GIS" and what doesn't?). IDC has probably the best overall industry analysis if you're willing to spend some money ($4500!) to buy their report. As an example of the sort of difficulty in doing these reports, I remember when I was at Intergraph there was some controversy when they suddenly ranked Bentley as the number 2 company instead of Intergraph, and we (and others) felt they must have been be counting lots of "CAD" users. But there are lots of people doing some sort of mapping applications with Microstation and AutoCAD so it's a gray area. This link http://apb.directionsmag.com/archives/4889-IDC-Pegs-SIM-Market-Growth-at-14.2.htmlsays that the latest IDC report puts the "SIM" market at $2.8bn, which is consistent with ESRI having 25-30% of the overall market in terms of revenue. How that translates into total numbers of users is a harder call. ESRI has a dominant presence in the academic market where license fees are relatively low, so in general I would think that their average revenue per end user is probably lower than most of their competitors like Intergraph, Bentley, Autodesk, Smallworld (GE), MapInfo (Pitney Bowes) etc. So on that basis Sean's number would probably be high. But on the other hand, analyses like IDC based on software revenue wouldn't include much if any open source software, so that might balance this out. Incidentally, I doubt that IDC has number of end users included in its report, it is mainly based around revenue from what I remember. But Dave Sonnen at IDC is a good source on these type of industry questions. The latest IDC report is available (for sale) at http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=213930 Another question is that when ESRI claims that 1m people use their software every day, what does that mean? If someone is an end user of a simple application built using an ESRI web server product, does that make them a "GIS professional"? Not necessarily I would say, but again obviously there's no clear definition there. GITA does a good report on the segments of the industry that they are involved in - utilities, telecom, local government, etc, which includes quite a bit of data on end users. This is a lot cheaper than most other market reports (disclosure: I am on the board of GITA - but not trying to sell you anything, just letting you know some of the information sources out there!). For example, in the electric sector based on responses from 88 electric utilities, they said: "The survey asked how many employees in an organization were actively engaged in the use of geospatial technology. Responses ranged from one employee to 2,500, providing a total of 22,385 employees from the electric sector. Some of these employees use geospatial technology for only a small portion of their work (as little as 1%), while others use it for as much as 100% of their work. Average use in the electric sector is 19%." There are about 3000 electric utilties in the US - http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/prim2/toc2.html. They have similar details for a variety of other sectors. This data also raises the question of how much of your time do you have to be using geospatial technology to count as a "GIS professional" (which I've always felt is such a fuzzy term to be pretty meaningless) - 100%, 50%, 20%? Incidentally, ESRI market share by number of seats in the GITA report varies very widely - from 2% in telecom through 20% in electric to 77% in public sector. The GITA report is available (for sale) at http://gita.org/resources/geo_report/georeport.asp So anyway, I think the answer to your question is (a) difficult to work out and (b) very heavily dependent on your definition of a GIS professional. If you're trying to estimate potential markets for OSM-related products it might also be worth asking the question in terms of potential users for the type of products etc, that would help get a bit more definition. On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 12:24 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hey Steve, > > Here are some back of the envelope calculations that might be helpful: > > Revenues in Millions $800 > No. of Organizations 300,000 > No' of Users 1,000,000 > Market Share 31% > Theoretical Total Market of GIS users – all vendors 3,225,806 > > ESRI (2008) "Corporate Capabilties" > http://www.esri.com/company/about/facts.html > > best, > sean > > > FortiusOne Inc, > 2200 Wilson Blvd. suite 307 > Arlington, VA 22201 > cell - 202-321-3914 > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "SteveC" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: [email protected] > Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 2:10:21 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern > Subject: [Geowanking] How many GIS professionals are there in the US? > > Subject says it all... I'm trying to pin down a number. I had amongst > other thoughts figured that if you knew ESRIs customer base / sales > figures then you could infer it as everyone uses ESRI right? But ESRI > is privately held and I can't find a figure that way. > > Anybody care to venture a guess? > > Best > > Steve > > > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > [email protected] > http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org > > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > [email protected] > http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org > -- Peter Batty - President, Spatial Networking W: +1 303 339 0957 M: +1 720 346 3954 Blog: http://geothought.blogspot.com
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