Geospatial information, literally, is like a bird's eye view of the earth, capturing graphic and cosmetic details of the area as sharp as an eagle does. Its applications are very many. It's not anymore a niche area of information technology, with a language understood only by geeks. People in general and planners of all hue and cry in particular have realised the importance. In fact, geospatial information has become an integral component of planning of a variety of developmental activity. Be it urban planning, transportation, utilities like gas and power, ascertaining natural resources, social forestry and location-based services, you find applications in geospatial.
Though the usage of geospatial knowledge is spreading very fast in India, there is no specific, comprehensive study so far to capture its status, spread and bottlenecks that actually dogged the industry.
Realising this lacuna, we have decided to make a comprehensive study in effort to put a variety of issues related to geospatial market, opportunities and challenges in perspective.
We have roped in IMRB to conduct a detailed study of the geospatial industry. We interacted with a host of stakeholders -- vendors, product developers, users, consultants. The list also included people who matter in several verticals also. We systematically assimilated and analysed the data and putforth the report.
The industry size
Though it will take a while to pool together information to ascertain the current market size, we furnish the details of the GIS market in 2006-07 to give an indication of the shape of things to come in the near future. The market size was put at Rs 6,830 million in four broad categories of software, hardware, data sales and services. While the first three components contributed Rs 3,370 million, service sector chipped in the remaining revenues. There, however, is a overlap of Rs 930 million in the form of purchases software and hardware products by the service segment. This segment added a value of Rs 2,524 m by developing products.
Obviously, it was the services segment that contributed the lion's share with Rs 3454 million, comprising 51 per cent of the total market. The contribution of other three components are: software (Rs 950 m); hardware (Rs 1,900 m); and data (Rs 520 m).
This really shows that what is being witnessed is just a tip of the iceberg, keeping in mind players in a wide variety of industrial, economic and social sectors beginning to put the GIS data into their planning.
The major players in software providers are ESRI, AutoDesk, Bentley Systems, Leica Geosystems, InterGraph and PCI Geomatics. The major GIS-related hardware providers included HP, Topcon, Sokkia, Leica and Pentax. While it is NRSA, Antrix, Digital Globe and GeoEye that dominate the data product scene, it is Rolta, InfoTech, RMSI, Speck Systems and Navayuga Spatial Technologies that occupy the space in the services sector. |
