Geoscape Geospatial API Platform

GoSource helped PSMA transform from bulk data licensing to a developer-friendly geospatial API platform with rapid market adoption.

Challenge

PSMA Australia held the country’s authoritative geospatial location data, and sold it the way such things had always been sold: large datasets, licensed to a small number of customers, through a reseller network.

Then Google arrived, and the shape of demand inverted. Suddenly there were many customers who each wanted a small slice of data and expected to pay incrementally for it. The market was growing while margins fell.

PSMA needed to become a developer-facing retail API business. Its first attempt at APIs was its existing products in a new wrapper, and developers were not biting.

Solution

We proposed something deliberately experimental: a suite of REST APIs built for developers on scalable cloud infrastructure, plus a different way of working. Ship something genuinely useful early, then let what people do with it tell you what to build next.

The team was integrated rather than contracted, drawn from both GoSource and PSMA, and took features end to end. Continuous integration, automation and real test coverage meant new features could go out quickly rather than in quarterly batches.

What came out was pay-as-you-go access to location data that does not require a background in geospatial systems to use. Releasing often, in response to evidence of what users needed, built a relationship with developers founded on responsiveness. The APIs grew to fit the market because the market kept telling us where they did not fit yet.

Outcomes

Inside two months the prototype had carried more traffic than the legacy product managed in eighteen.

The scope grew past the dataset we started with, pulled by demand rather than pushed by a roadmap. PSMA’s APIs are now the country’s default route to geospatial data, and they are part of why location data has become ordinary infrastructure rather than a specialist purchase.

The deeper change was organisational. PSMA restructured into multidisciplinary product teams, which is a different thing from buying a product and considerably harder to do.

Technologies

RESTful APIs designed for developers rather than for data licensing. Scalable cloud infrastructure. Continuous integration and automated testing. Rapid iterative releases. Integrated product teams across both organisations. Pay-as-you-go pricing.