How Esri’s geospatial intelligence tools are accelerating global business

The global nature of business makes tracking your company's operations trickier than ever before. Overseeing supply chains and an international, dispersed workforce is tough. Maintaining visibility over all aspects of your operations is even tougher. The changing norms of business make location services no longer a "nice to have" but a "need to have" — and at the forefront of the geospatial intelligence revolution is Esri .

The company empowers businesses to gain a competitive advantage through its industry-leading geographic information system (GIS) technology. It's a mission Esri has been devoted to since its founding in 1969: helping solve some of the world's most difficult problems by providing global location intelligence to more than 350,000 organizations across the planet.

Esri is the creator of ArcGIS, the world's most powerful mapping and spatial analytics software.

Geospatial intelligence gained from this technology adds value to a company's products for customers, acts as a competitive differentiator in a highly complex world and provides insight to companies to make better decisions. For organizations looking to lead the way, Esri's high-powered system and industry-leading expertise provide a data-driven advantage.

This year, Esri debuted a new way for businesses to access world-leading mapping and analytics technology: ArcGIS Platform, a flexible platform-as-a-service. In ArcGIS Platform, developers can get a look under the hood of ArcGIS and add select capabilities from the complete system to their own applications. The PaaS offering comes with fully featured APIs but also integrates with open-source options so businesses can easily build location capabilities into their existing tools. And businesses big and small around the world are using ArcGIS Platform to build and scale powerful applications, mine greater insights from their own data and deliver meaningful benefits to their bottom line, all while harnessing the power of Esri's decades of experience in location services.

"Esri's collection of ready-to-use basemaps give our users a solution to better understand their data by presenting it visually on a map," said Ben Brantly, vice president of Product at Salesforce, one of Esri's clients. "The capabilities of the ArcGIS Platform allow us to continue to expand the value we provide to Salesforce maps users by leveraging additional Esri location services as well as the adoption of the JavaScript API."

Salesforce harnesses Esri's technological prowess to realize its plan for a map-based tool to help organizations visualize massive amounts of CRM data, pinpointing the best possible options for future growth. Today, Esri's location services are the driving force behind Salesforce Maps — one crucial part of the world's leading CRM platform.

Other companies, like European GIS company Con Terra GmbH, have been utilizing the tools enabled by Esri for more than 25 years. "We and our customers especially value the rich geospatial capabilities, support for modern architectures and constant stream of innovations that ArcGIS provides," said Christian Elfers, Con Terra GmbH's chief technology officer. The recent development of the ArcGIS Platform offering enables Con Terra to go even further with its own offering. "Its 'service-first' design and API key-based access will allow us to integrate smartly into our customers' business systems and build solutions that provide a better user experience."

That level of pinpoint accuracy is vital when powering location services — whether they're services that underpin the world's shipping routes or national emergency service dispatchers. GeoComm is another longstanding client of Esri's that trusts its expertise and reliability for one of the most vital tools there is: the ability to route emergency service calls to the right location. "Literally every day, thousands of 911 call-takers from coast to coast use our ArcGIS-powered software applications to pinpoint the location of emergencies and get help to the scene as fast as possible," said John Brosowsky, GeoComm vice president of Innovation. "Thankfully, ArcGIS Platform technology for 3D and indoor mapping provides exactly what we need to unlock this new capability for public safety users."

Whether you're looking to build basemaps, plan routing and directions that reduce time and costs or want to use spatial analytics to crunch down massive amounts of data into easily realizable recommendations, Esri's geospatial expertise can help unlock new business opportunities and fine-tune pre-existing ones.

Esri's technology is now underpinning 50% of Fortune 500 companies, most national governments, 20,000 cities, 50 U.S. states and more than 7,000 universities worldwide. And Esri isn't content standing still: 11 of the firm's 49 offices are research and development centers, with around 30% of annual revenue plowed back into R&D. It all helps customers achieve superior results by mitigating risk, optimizing operations, growing sales and serving its own customers better.

Could your organization benefit from unlocking the intelligence of geospatial data? Sign up for a free developer account and explore the possibilities with ArcGIS Platform.