Today, there are literally hundreds of geospatial implementations on the market. To avoid being locked-in to one particular vendor or product, software consumers, and especially governments, are increasingly selecting solutions that use open international standards. Geospatial solution providers understand this, and are implementing solutions based on open standards, now more than ever. These open standards are published by the Open Geospatial Consortium, the only industry consensus organization in the world focusing on location standards.
Before investing in a product, customers often ask if vendors are implementing these open standards correctly, in other words, are the implementations compliant to the standards. Buyers can be confident that a compliant product will work with another compliant product based on the same OGC standard, regardless of the product vendor.
It's very easy for a vendor to test their product for compliance. http://cite.opengeospatial.org/getCer...
After the vendor gets a product certified, the vendor can post an "OGC-Certified" logo on their web page and promote the fact that their product is OGC Compliant. This leads to more business opportunities.
