ISPs of all kinds (but especially WISPs) will find a use for Geographic Information Software (GIS). Manifold is one provider, and claims to have disruptive pricing.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [February 27, 2009]

I'm calling Carson City, Nev.-based Geographic Information Software (GIS) company Manifold because Brian Webster uses the company's software. If you have not yet read about the WISP mapping initiative, please do so at WISP Industry Needs to Build a Map and Prepare for the New Form 477.

I'm expecting a straightforward interview about a simple product, but Dimitri Rotow, Manifold product manager, is talking about the disruption of the $2 billion per year GIS industry.

He says his competitors are trying to charge $5,000 to $50,000 per customer whereas his pricing runs closer to $275 to $800 per license.

"Our approach is different," he says. "We believe in mainstream markets."

The company's product, the Manifold System, run somewhat like middleware, connecting databases such as lists of addresses, maps of the world, and anything else you want to throw at it. It uses mathematical functions to manipulate the data.

They can be straightforward, such as how would my RF signal propagate over terrain, given a radio at altitude x. Or they can be more complex.

"The system has a neurological fuzzy logic engine," he says.

"So do you need a Ph.D in Mathematics to use it," I ask.

No. It's all about right clicking "find more like this," he says. For example, if you obtain a demo of the product, you can throw in the demo Northwind Traders database from Microsoft Access. It will plot the customers (in England, France, Belgium).

Rotow has a story. "We have a citrus grower in Florida. He bought Manifold and wrote us a wonderful testimonial. He drives his truck to places and sells his product. In some places, people line up around the block to buy, and in others, nobody buys. He couldn't figure out what made it work, so he interfaced the Manifold System with demographics and started right clicking on the places that worked, asking the system for 'more like this.' He still has no idea what makes it profitable, but the system has found profitable locations for him."

With a fuzzy logic engine, the more data you give it, the better the results. The citrus grower had a large number of locations he'd already tried and that large data set resulted in quality output.

Manifold has a gallery page showing a wide variety of applications of the software, from all over the world, from plotting the placement of power lines in India to calculating the difficulty of several exercise routes for a bicycle club here in the U.S.

The features
The product has far too many features to list here. Rotow says it's like Microsoft Office in that it will have more features than you need, but that if you ever need a feature, it will be available. "The core product has an enormous feature set," he says. "But everyone want a different mix of 5 percent of our features."

He says that typically, one person at each company will spend enough time to become that company's expert on the software.

If you have the time, you can learn a lot about the software from the internet. There is a detailed manual online and there are also some very active forums. Paid training is also available from third party providers like GIS Advisor (just Google "GIS training" for other providers and sources).

The professional edition provides access to a number of sources of mapping data, and the enterprise edition adds database functionality and DBMS controls.

Power users may want to add any or all of three optional extensions.

The surface tools package adds a roster of several hundred functions that can be performed on surfaces. Rotow says that if you're building cell towers and have to plot the flow of watersheds, you might need this, but the basic package "already has a formidable ability to work with surfaces."

ISPs will be more interested in the geocoding extension, which allows users to translate latitude and longitude information into street addresses.

The business tools extension appears to be designed for enterprises that need to map out regular deliveries, and might not be used by ISPs.

"The average customer will buy the enterprise edition plus geocoding, and then might add a couple of seats with surface tools as well," Rotow says.

Support
Why does Manifold charge for support? "We charge one-fifth of what Microsoft charges, per incident, and one-tenth of what other GIS firms charge," says Rotow. Every license comes with two or more free support incidents, and additional incidents can be purchased individually or in bulk discounts.

"We all know that 'free support' is paid for by the people who don't use it. Most people read our user manual and participate in our online forum and never use a support incident," says Rotow. "Those who use free support are all too often those who believe in buying software but don't believe in reading the manual or problem solving. They tie up serious engineers with simple questions. If you charge for support, you eliminate the dumb questions, and our support engineers get only serious questions. As a result, the quality of support we provide is better and the cost is lower."

Most ISPs reading this article will wish that they, too, could charge per incident for support and avoid the dumb questions by sending users to a forum.

Recent updates
The Manifold System is currently in release 8 and is about to go to release 9. During the update process, Rotow says, users typically request 8,000 to 15,000 features and the company commits to 200 targets which become about 1,000 tasks.

Release 9 was first previewed at Manifold's London user conference in February of 2009, and although there are many new features, Rotow says that there is one key feature. The new release may already have about 2 million lines of code, but about 200,000 lines of additional code in Version 9 enable the software to take advantage of NVIDIA's CUDA architecture.

CUDA allows software designers to use graphics processors to accelerate any software, not just graphics software. Since the latest graphics cards have close to 300 processors on board (as opposed to four cores in the CPU), software can run a lot faster. Rotow says the company demonstrated its software running on over 1400 processors, of which 4 were in the core, and the rest were on graphics cards.

Even with one graphics card, there's a remarkable improvement. The Manifold gallery has a video of a typical surface manipulation function taking almost 60 seconds without CUDA and about 2 seconds with CUDA on a single NVIDIA card.

Pricing and availability
Release 8 is available now and release 9 of the Manifold System is due soon.

Detailed pricing information is available on the Manifold website. The software comes in 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

The 32 bit version of the Professional Edition costs $295.

The 32 bit version Manifold 8 Enterprise with Geocoding costs $425.

The 32 bit version of the Universal Edition (Enterprise with all three extensions) costs $575.

Purchase separately, the geocoding tools cost $50, the surface tools cost $145, and the business tools cost $95.

A Manifold DVD costs $35 (as opposed to downloading the software from the internet).

One technical support incident costs $49 and a block of 10 incidents costs $149.

Other options and configurations are available and are listed on the Manifold website.

—End