Geocortex Insight has launched... and this is what we’ve learned so far.

In October we officially launched Geocortex Insight, our newest product that helps customers understand use patterns, quantify and report on their GIS infrastructure’s return-on-investment, and build better applications based on near-real time data analysis. It is the successor to Geocortex Optimizer, which we released eight years ago, and has been built from the ground up to reflect the modern ArcGIS platform era.

Geocortex Insight is a new, version 1.0 product, so we’ve been monitoring it extra closely as we manage its phased roll-out to customers. We started with a small beta (test) group before its release, and then focused on deploying it to Geocortex Optimizer customers since the official launch. At this stage in the product’s development, installation and configuration support is required from our team (we will be adding self-configuration capabilities to the next version of Geocortex Insight); this means we’ve had the opportunity to work closely with our customers to fully understand what is required to get them up and running, and have been able to hear from them – directly – about the value they’re finding with the product.

Here are the top six themes we’ve encountered during our initial installations – and have heard from Geocortex Insight customers – so far:

1. Maximizing the ROI of applications, services, and infrastructure is critical. Ensuring the return on investment (ROI) of a GIS infrastructure and applications by knowing how much they are being used helps with future planning. Customers are using Geocortex Insight to show how many people are using the map services or features they’ve created; it also shows the demands on servers, including CPU and memory, to know if the infrastructure is being used to its potential.
2. Focusing optimization efforts gives the greatest impact. Enabling users to perform their business tasks at peak performance (by identifying weak areas that can be optimized) makes for a better overall experience. Customers are identifying errors that reoccur from a particular resource, and know which map services are the slowest – and/or put the most demands on their resources – and are focusing their optimization efforts accordingly.
3. Troubleshooting problems as quickly as possible prevents headaches. Being alerted to issues immediately means they can be resolved quickly. Customers are reviewing reports to see the inter-relationship of a variety of data to understand what the roots of problems are. If they receive a slow response time alert, they are discovering through Geocortex Insight reports whether it was due to a server nearing capacity, a spike in users using a new map service, or an issue with the configuration of a new application.
4. Planning for the future is easier when following demand trends. Geocortex Insight visually expresses demand changes over time, and customers are taking advantage of this to know when to add new resources.
5. Understanding users’ behaviors helps build better applications. Knowing what types of browsers are displaying applications (and how frequently they are being used), how many users are new versus returning, and what services are being used are helping guide our customers’ efforts to align with their users’ behaviors.
6. Monitoring what is important needs to be easy. Most of our customers tell us how busy they are, so keeping track of key metrics by creating their own custom Geocortex Insight dashboards – and easily seeing the data that is important to them in one place – is definitely something we are hearing about often.

We are excited to bring Geocortex Insight to a broader audience in 2016. You can register for a webinar — Introducing Geocortex Insight — which we will be hosting on January 26. If you’d like to see the product in action and learn more, we invite you to attend (and recommend you bring a system administrator/IT colleague with you who is directly involved with monitoring your organization’s infrastructure).

You can learn more about Geocortex Insight by visiting the product’s site, or by contacting your Account Manager/authorized Geocortex reseller as applicable.