2009 ESRI Petroleum User Group (PUG) Conference

Today is day two of the 2009 Petroleum User's Group conference. Yesterday featured the standard PUG fair including the usual ESRI plenary "dog and pony" show followed by some really good user presentations. Lead by Clint Brown, the tone of the plenary talks centered on "Web GIS." Highlights included ArcGIS 9.3.1 discussion, demos of the JS and FLEX APIs as well as some discussion about yet another sharing framework being designed via ArcGIS Online. To the dismay of a typically traditional GIS audience, it is clear that the focus of ESRI's R & D/future direction is "Web GIS." I'm not even sure if Desktop was even mentioned. The term "consumable" in the context of data and services was mentioned at least a dozen times with emphasis is user experience oriented towards the Google and VE patterns.