GISCafe Voice Industry Predictions for 2021
"Spatial is the key and needs to become more mainstream – how often have we heard this plea within our 
industry, but we are seeing this happen now.
If 2020 was the year spatial moved center stage due to its high profile use in the pandemic response, 2021 will see it amplified further still as we continue to leverage its value in automating data and business processes. For example, the official Irish Covid data portal was rapidly implemented by our customer, Ordnance Survey Ireland, to enable vital collaboration through public data sharing, visualisation and analysis because of their high quality data and spatial engineering expertise.
Scientific American’s top 10 trends for 2020 placed ‘spatial computing’ at number three. ‘Spatial computing’ might sound exotic but is essentially describing detailed spatial data use cases and the techniques we as a community employ every day, albeit at scale.
The past 12 months have focused and accelerated existing trends that we predicted last year: The continuing surge to cloud services, the importance of automation, data quality, and the growth of the data economy. As we head into 2021, we’ll also see the importance of portals, platforms and hubs really coming to the fore, particularly in realising the much-promised benefits of machine learning..."