Last week was the 2017 Esri UC and apparently the largest Esri UC to date with almost 18,000 attendees. The excitement and amount of people was evident during the Monday morning kickoff / plenary session with a packed house and hundreds standing in the back trying to get a glimpse of the enigmatic Jack Dangermond. Whenever a wave of claustrophobia came over, I thought about the fact that Comic-Con actually fills the San Diego Convention Center to capacity each year with 130,000 interesting characters.
Here are my thoughts on the plenary and the days that followed.
The plenary focused on The Science of Where, a curious tagline that inundated the conference. As it sounds, the science of where attempts to conflate sciencey bits with GIS, which is definitely true. GIS analysts do amazing and rigorous observation and analysis as well as work through hypotheses and theorems. Though, much of GIS focuses on managing assets spatially, not exactly science. Overall, the message was appreciated.
Monday evening after the plenary, LOGIC hosted our UC Dinner Cruise. Nearly 60 industry colleagues (including folks from BP, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, BHP Billiton, EnerVest, Marathon, Colonial Pipeline, Esri, Safe Software / FME, etc) enjoyed dinner, drinks and a cruise around the bay. As always, it was a good time, and we look forward to hosting it again next year.
Tuesday, the plethora of great sessions began to overwhelm, though I focused in on the Spatiotemporal Data store/ GeoEvent processor/ GeoAnalytics talks. The ability to create and dynamically filter and summarize event-driven layers is beyond cool. I have a feeling this movement will revolutionize the way GIS data is captured and consumed. Good stuff!
That afternoon, we hung around the oil and gas user papers presentation area and caught a great talk from our client, EnerVest, about their evolution to Enterprise GIS. Nathan Wood of EnerVest talked about using the Esri platform and FME to change the way data was created and leveraged within the organization, and where LOGIC provided assistance! Nice work, Nathan.
Tuesday evening was another successful outdoors Petroleum Users Group Social overlooking the bay with hundreds of peers from the industry sharing stories. Thanks to Danny Spillmann, Geoff Wade and the gang for delivering a fun event. Nice vibe in the industry.
As always, the Esri UC is a nice break from the summer heat in Houston as well as a good time overall. Great catching up with colleagues and clients and hearing about what is on the horizon for Esri. Until next year!
Author:
, LOGIC Vice President - Business Solutions