Once a research institute, Esri, the "baby" of Jack Dangermond, has grown to an incredible user base of 350 000 enterprise organizations focusing on location problems as varied as business efficiency, conservation, making cities more livable or organizing and optimizing logistics. Following trends like faster networking, cloud computing, increased data capture, sensor networks and crowd sourcing, Geography as a science is maturing and becoming more available with open data policies, "allowing the world to see the world" and creating greater consciousness about our surroundings.
GIS has also seen a change from the traditional enterprise pattern of desktops, servers and federated systems - led by IBM, Microsoft and others - to a web cloud pattern, where everything is connected from powerful cloud servers that support mapping and virtualization to mobile web clients with the geospatial services foundation to deliver pervasive maps, visualization and analytics to everybody.
ArcGIS.com is a website launched last year that already has millions of maps and tens of thousands of services and datasets in a cloud environment that people are using and exchanging. This summer the website will offer hosting of user-authored maps and services making it a strong platform for developers using open APIs. Once online, user-authored maps become intelligent web maps: a new medium that blends together data and analytics and publishes them in a form that can be easily shared, edited and visualized across platforms and devices. Social media and real-time statistics are enabled.
Hear of features like real-time integration with twitter and other feeds; more and faster analytics; side-by-side maps that allow us to compare multiple maps synchronously with different authored data; and hosting, not only of simple features but of entire datasets. These features allow a faster, more ubiquitous and easily shared experience. They offer a huge potential for both developers and GIS users. This version will integrate geospatial science and technology into our everyday lives.
Jack Dangermond is the founder and president of Esri. Founded in 1969 and headquartered in Redlands, California, Esri is widely recognized as the technical and market leader in geographic information system (GIS) software, pioneering innovative solutions for working with spatial data on the desktop, across the enterprise, in the field, and on the Web. Esri has the largest GIS software install base in the world with more than one million users in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide.
Dangermond fostered the growth of Esri from a small research group to an organization of over 2,900 employees, known internationally for GIS software development, training, and services.
Dangermond holds ten honorary doctorates from California Polytechnic University-Pomona, State University of New York at Buffalo, Technical University for Civil Engineering of Bucharest – Romania, University of West Hungary, City University in London, University of Redlands in California, Ferris State University in Michigan, Loma Linda University, University of Arizona, and University of Minnesota.
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Photo: Esri