ArcGIS Online not yet a complete Cloud GIS platform?

Question

During a recent demo of ArcGIS Online it occurred to me there's much work to be done before it becomes a complete Cloud GIS platform. It may represent a Cloud Pattern. But it's one small step for Esri. And not a giant leap for the GIS Community. At present, ArcGIS Online seems to be only two things:

1) A platform for hosting services (bravo, quite nice)
2) A collaboration platform

Did I miss something in failing to be awe-struck?

The real power of the Cloud seems absent, e.g. being able to send large analysis workloads to the cloud and receive an answer; and running ArcGIS Desktop completely in the Cloud. So I started an idea on ideas.arcgis.com to encourage more rapid development of ArcGIS Online:

Make ArcGIS Online a Complete Cloud GIS Platform; not just a hosted services and collaboration platform 
http://ideas.arcgis.com/ideaView?id=087E00000004EhHIAU

Hope I'm mistaken, as I often am, and there's a lot more depth and breadth to ArcGIS Online than what I saw in the presentation. What else does ArcGIS Online presently have to offer that's escaped my attention?

danan · Answer

I just recieved ESRI's mass mailing about the cloud. They claim to be first. Thats a bald face lie. Cloud GIS is provided by lots of people including, well CouldGIS.com. I digress.

There are OGC standards for cloud GIS computing and using multithreaded worker applications for geoprocessing. The "cloud" part can be centralized or decentralized (for example the method the SETI utiliyzes is decentralized). There are already methods to provide what you are looking for, it just isnt in the ArcGIS toolkit.

I think you would be better served to find a data cloud provider and not bother petitioning ESRI. The lock-in to their data types and software really limits what you can do with your data.

ArcGIS online is what it is, but what you are searching for is out there.

Thanks Jason. Haven't read the mailing you're referencing. Could be a garden variety half truth of the sort one often finds in marketing. True in some limited sense and/or unstated sub-context. Par for the course in promotional lit from most vendors. Marketers and developers aren't always on the same page. So I might give them a pass there.

Glad to hear there are OGC standards for GIS cloud computing that vendors can be judged against and held accountable to. That's encouraging. Customers can and should petition vendors to satisfy their business needs. While it may be naive to believe we'll get everything we ask for we may at least get a portion of it. So it's worthwhile to try. A good case can be made for customer activism catalyzing innovation.

SETI is an interesting case of citizens donating spare compute time to advance non-commercial research. Perhaps not so interesting to for-profit entities like cloud vendors. In an era when NASA receives only one half of one penny out of every tax dollar (I know SETI is now private and no longer associated with NASA), I wish there were more opportunities to donate spare compute time to it and other worthwhile non-profit research causes. A product like ArcGIS Online often gets marketed as a way for citizens to donate their "cognitive surplus" (to borrow a term from Clay Shirky). But not computational surplus.

JasonStambaugh · Answer

I just recieved ESRI's mass mailing about the cloud. They claim to be first. Thats a bald face lie. Cloud GIS is provided by lots of people including, well CouldGIS.com. I digress.

There are OGC standards for cloud GIS computing and using multithreaded worker applications for geoprocessing. The "cloud" part can be centralized or decentralized (for example the method the SETI utiliyzes is decentralized). There are already methods to provide what you are looking for, it just isnt in the ArcGIS toolkit.

I think you would be better served to find a data cloud provider and not bother petitioning ESRI. The lock-in to their data types and software really limits what you can do with your data.

ArcGIS online is what it is, but what you are searching for is out there.