Few Western practitioners would have heard of Zhong Ershun. That is strange. He is, in fact, one of the most influential people in the GIS industry. The decisions he makes during the next few years may determine the shape of the industry in the next decade. It will certainly influence the software you buy, and the things you can do with it.
Hyperbole? Consider this. Zhong is chief executive of SuperMap GIS, the largest GIS company in China, a country that will overtake the US as the world’s largest software market sometime this decade. Supermap is currently the GIS of choice in thousands of sites across China.
Zhong says his software is employed for cadastral management at over 100 cities and counties. It is the GIS that Chinese practitioners first discover at over 120 universities. There are over 400 application developers.
It would be a strange thing if the US companies that currently dominate the world GIS market continue to do so in the face of the size of China and the Chinese commitment to GIS.
According to Zhong, that commitment is huge. ‘The biggest event in China this decade will be modernisation; and the movement of people from the country into the cities. ‘This will lead to all sorts of problems. We need to manage the growth of cities to make sure that we create environments we want to live in,’ he says. ‘Many Chinese cities suffer from extremely bad infrastructure. For instance, the air in Beijing is frequently almost unbreathable, due to heating oil and traffic. We need to fix these problems and avoid creating new ones. GIS will be a significant element in that process.‘Rapid urbanisation attracts a lot of attention, but it is not the only story in China. The land the people leave behind needs to be used productively and sustainably. While China certainly has food security, at least for the next few decades, there are plenty of environmental problems that need to be addressed.
‘China is chronically short of water. Unless we can improve the flow of fresh, clean drinking water, our new cities will be unliveable.
‘On the other hand, flooding is a frequent danger. Historically, the Yangtze and the Yellow River have killed many hundreds of thousands of people. China is drained by major rivers that rise on the Tibetan Plateau, and they can be swollen by melting ice at certain times of the year.
‘The erosion of topsoil is also a major problem. Not only does it denude the land and make it infertile, major cities can be subject to dust storms.
‘GIS is a major monitoring, data integration and decision support tool in all these areas,’
Zhong says administrators in general understand the link between IT and good decisions, and so it is easy to sell GIS. It doesn’t guarantee good decisions of course.
SuperMap may be running hard to keep up with demand in China, but that has not stopped Zhong casting an eye over the international market. In fact, the evidence seems to be quite the reverse. He is no more likely than US executives to be happy with the size of his own back yard.
A Japanese language version of the Supermap suite was introduced in 2000 and a Korean version in 2004. The first English version will be launched later this year.
He has been buoyed by his efforts so far. With just over a year’s marketing effort, the company claims about 1200 users in Japan, and almost as many in Korea. There is already a significant user base in Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The company recently signed its first European partners in France and the UK. The plan is to role out versions in most of the mainstream European languages within the next few years. He is still looking for companies with the capability he needs.
‘The availability of versions in other languages depend more on partners who can undertake the translation than anything else’, Zhong says. He says he is currently on the lookout for other organisations with the capability to develop applications for their own local markets.
SuperMap has been around since 1997. The company was founded with support from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where Zhong and several of his colleagues were researchers. Today, they employ around 300 people.
He continues to hold academic positions. He is currently the vice president of the Chinese Association for GIS and Remote Sensing.
Zhong’s bullishness about the international scene is due in part to the fact that a new version of the software has just been released that can compete head-to-head with software offerings from the US.
Supermap 5.0 has been rewritten around the latest Microsoft standards. There is a standard desktop GIS. Then there are four versions for integrating GIS into enterprise processing. Supermap Objects is a set of components written in COM, Java or .Net. There is a version for Internet mapping called IS.Net, a version for mobile applications such as personal digital assistants or mobile phones called e-SuperMap and a database technology called SuperMap SDX.
The technology is being licensed in China to several thousand developers who are building applications for end users.
Zhong says, for instance, that over 1000 companies are currently working on in-car mapping products in China, and many use SuperMap as their basic spatial engine.
So far, there are none in Australia or New Zealand. That is a situation he wants to rectify soon.
Jon Fairall interviewed Ershun Zhong in Ha Noi, Vietnam on 14 November 2005
