SDI Modernization: Esri to Open Standards
Agencies don't stay on proprietary GIS because they love the renewal. They stay because migrating looks risky and nobody on staff has done one.
The migration itself is a well understood problem. The part that takes judgment is doing it without breaking the workflows people depend on every day. Our CEO started his career at Esri Defense Services, so we know both sides of this move.
How a migration actually goes
Data.
File and enterprise geodatabases, shapefiles, and rasters move into PostGIS and cloud-optimized imagery with GDAL. This part is mostly mechanical.
Services.
ArcGIS map and feature services become WMS, WMTS, WFS, and OGC API Features on GeoServer. Anything that speaks OGC keeps working. Clients hard-wired to Esri's REST API need attention, and we find those during the inventory, not in production.
Styling.
This is the part people underestimate. Esri symbology doesn't convert cleanly, so cartography gets rebuilt in SLD, CSS, or MBStyle. We budget for it up front.
Parallel run.
The new stack runs alongside the old one, and we validate against your real workflows before anything gets turned off.
What the engagement delivers
- Inventory and dependency map of your current Esri or proprietary stack
- Target architecture on GeoServer, PostGIS, and OGC APIs
- Data migration from shapefiles, geodatabases, and services to open formats
- Parallel deployment validated against your existing workflows
- Staff training and operations runbooks
Where you land
You can land on plain upstream GeoServer and PostGIS, which carry no license fee at all. Or you can land on CoreSpatial by NGS, which adds quarterly releases, immediate CVE patching, and support on a per-deployment subscription, never per user or per CPU.
Either way, there's no renewal cycle holding your data hostage, and nothing about the architecture ties you to us.
Duration and procurement
Duration: 4 to 8 weeks.
- Fixed scope and fixed price, agreed before work starts.
- Available through GSA MAS (47QTCA26D002H) and Tradewinds.
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