Governments are major customers of GIS products and services

According to the most recent estimates of Cambridge, Mass.-based Daratech Inc., an information technology market research and consulting firm, government agencies in the United States spend about $961 million globally on GIS products and services. State and local governments accounted for about 69 percent of that public-sector spending, with the remaining 31 percent coming from federal agencies.

Worldwide, vendors of GIS software, services data and hardware earned a total of $3.31 billion in revenue in 2005, according to Daratech estimates. Daratech will be issuing new government market statistics covering full-year 2007 estimates and 2008 forecasts by the end of the first quarter of 2008. 

Daratech analysts noted that federal agencies are making greater use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software whenever possible. The need for federal officials to work more closely together on Homeland Security projects is a factor that is driving more federal departments to rely on COTS software.

The federally sponsored Landfire project, which is scheduled to run through 2009, is influencing public-sector GIS spending, Daratech noted. Spatially enabled fuel and vegetation data obtained through Landfire will enable federal officials to fight wildfires proactively and manage hazardous fuels around forests and sensitive ecosystems.

More and more state and local governments, Daratech explained, are integrating geospatial information with government enterprise applications, such as customer relationship and supply chain management systems. The goal: to provide better services to the general public and other public-sector stakeholders.

Environmental planners in government, for instance, rely on GIS systems to generate data in response to federal and state mandates. According to Daratech experts, a variety of data-intensive processes in government “cry out for support from GIS/geospatial technologies.”