Can you elaborate on some of your key initiatives in empowering organizations in this region with spatial data and services?
The initiative date back to 1994, when we pioneered GIS in India. Since then we have constantly tried to deliver quality products and services to the marketplace. Developing the all India GIS datasets was a mammoth task that could not be achieved instantly. We took a top down approach for realizing this objective and a bottom up approach to ensure the quality and accuracy of the datasets created. From the beginning our focus on developing products for the marketplace and not pursuing job-orders. This has helped us to provide data products to the market. Our Standard All India Digital Map has all roads, villages and towns, water bodies and green and is increasingly used by the industry. Providing GIS enabled services based on our map data products has been our key initiative in Empowering Enterprise with Intelligence.

How important do you think is spatial data/services for functioning, growth or management of various organizations' in India?
Knowing one's locus standi helps one evaluate the ground realities confronting one’s business. Spatial sciences map not only your position, but also map the position of the competition. Spatial data with its attributes to show location is much more powerful for analysis and decision making than tabular data. Knowing the environment you operate in and determining the locus standi of the competition not only provides a strong MIS tool for smooth functioning, growth or management of various organizations', it also enables you to craft winning strategies. For CE it has been the cornerstone of our revenue model. We are proud to have the largest repository of digital maps of India. We have mapped over 1500 cities at various scales.

In generating databases with CE Info, what had been the main hurdles?
When we started in 1994, the barriers to growth were lack of trained manpower, lack of enough training institutes that could impart training on GIS and general lack of awareness about the immense potential of geospatial science both amongst the user community as well as the data creators and suppliers GIS being a niche segment in the tech boom the market was witnessing, the market size was small and many a times it was a deterrent for creation of innovative products. However, the barriers of inconvenience have dwindled over time. The present day menace in this area is piracy and the lack of protection from it. With the increase in the market size, demand and number of players in the industry, adequate regulations should be adopted to check on data pilferage and piracy.