> I've always wondered why there isn't a solid tech company that could build a product that could take over Arc's business
A few reasons:
1.) many geotech companies require on premise installations because they want control of their data and/or the internet quality at remote sites is poor. This means that a SaaS solution is a non-starter.
2.) Most geotechs are already familiar with Arc tools due to Arc’s aggressive marketing to universities
3.) Arc is a swiss army knife which can do most things “good enough”. For most businesses Arc can do what they want out of the box. Products like felt only have 1/10th or less of the functionality as Arc.
We are in the process of replacing Arc with our own custom platform at my company. If you are a heavy user of Arc you quickly outgrow the capabilities of the system. We want to serve petabytes of geotechnical data, and Arc quickly starts to choke on data sizes that large. The operational work of keeping Arc up and running smoothly is also a major headache since you don’t have access to the source code and the error messages in Arc are very poor which means you rely on ESRI support a lot.
A few reasons:
1.) many geotech companies require on premise installations because they want control of their data and/or the internet quality at remote sites is poor. This means that a SaaS solution is a non-starter.
2.) Most geotechs are already familiar with Arc tools due to Arc’s aggressive marketing to universities
3.) Arc is a swiss army knife which can do most things “good enough”. For most businesses Arc can do what they want out of the box. Products like felt only have 1/10th or less of the functionality as Arc.
We are in the process of replacing Arc with our own custom platform at my company. If you are a heavy user of Arc you quickly outgrow the capabilities of the system. We want to serve petabytes of geotechnical data, and Arc quickly starts to choke on data sizes that large. The operational work of keeping Arc up and running smoothly is also a major headache since you don’t have access to the source code and the error messages in Arc are very poor which means you rely on ESRI support a lot.