Dear Fellow GIS Fans,
I realize I’m overdue for my “President’s Letter” and I apologize for my tardiness. I have many reasons for my tardiness but none are very good so let me simply fill you in on what’s been happening in the life and times of 3-GIS. First, we’re growing and healthy! We met profitability crossing into our second year and we consider that a landmark event. Considering 80% of all small businesses fail before their second year in existence, we consider our technology and direction to be well accepted by the market and our business success is simply a reflection of a market need. We’re still a small company and personally, I really like it that way for now. We are focused on our products and customers and the only real pressure we have on us is the pressure to ensure we meet market demands in thin-client technology with stable reliable products. As a small company (even a “registered small company with the SBA”) we’re not quite as small as we were a year ago. We recently passed 25 employees and are staffing hard to ensure we build the best corporate foundation for sustaining our growing customer base in our product suite. Speaking of customer base, we have over 25 active customers and 9 direct product-related customers. Life is good!
The exciting things on our horizon are many but the two that seem to keep me busiest are our new partnership with Research in Motion (RIM) to deliver BlackBerry-based mobile solutions and our product architectural extension into the Software as a Service (Saas) model. We are developing a BlackBerry solution as a response to market demands to meet the light-editing mobile users’ requirements. The ubiquitous nature of the BlackBerry and the flexibility of ArcGIS Server are providing us the pieces to further our business and meet the requests of technicians, managers, and end-customers who need a view into their asset geodatabase. On the second front, SaaS, we’re excited to be developing partner hosting relationships to offer and deliver Field Express and Network Express in a hosted environment. We are developing a business model that will allow those that don’t have the resources (financial or personnel) to have a GIS at their disposal with extremely low cost of ownership. The SaaS model will allow for the avoidance of capital expenditures and free up cash to focus on other critical infrastructure needs. We see SaaS in GIS as the future for small to medium sized telecom and utility companies. Let us take the headache of database tuning, software version management, landbase currency, hardware scalability, and reliability off the table for you. You do what you do best and we will do what we do best. It’s a win-win situation.
And finally, keep your eyes posted for 3-GIS in the news. We recently hired two fabulous ladies in our marketing department who are planning to make 2009 the year of 3-GIS in the media. Amy Garrison, a veteran in the world of product and brand awareness, and Ali Hyatt, her lead assistant, will be taking our products and services to new venues worldwide. We’ll see you soon, I’m sure.
Yours truly,
Tom Counts
President
3-GIS
November 2008
