Early this May, Esri announced the release of the Esri Geospatial Cloud.  

The Esri Geospatial Cloud  unifies Esri’s software and services while offering flexible, subscription-based licensing. Esri Geospatial Cloud offers a complete GIS including location services, geoenabled systems, applications, and software development tools to help organizations make better data-driven decisions. With flexible licensing options and focused turnkey solutions, CEOs, IT executives, data scientists, and urban planners can now purchase the geospatial capabilities specific to their needs. It is location intelligence on demand.

The Esri Geospatial Cloud, Dangermond said, “is mapping and GIS done at a whole new scale, which is often referred to as Web GIS. But the Esri Geopatial Cloud opens the world of visualization and analysis to many businesses, utilities, and governments. Esri Geospatial Cloud will let existing GIS users and new adopters to expand their effectiveness across their organizations, from fieldworkers and executives to software developers and data scientists.” 

The Esri Geospatial Cloud, according to Esri President Jack Dangermond is “how we are now delivering functionality given the combined forces of computing power and the cloud. With the benefits of the expanded computing capacity of the cloud presently, users can easily and inexpensively leverage massive cloud computing resources and access a wealth of information on almost any subject.” 

“The Esri Geospatial Cloud is delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based platform, providing hundreds of analytic and visualization capabilities that can be combined in easy-to-use apps for a variety of applications. It also offers ready-to-use demographic datasets and map/imagery layers that allow users to gain immediate context to applications of all types. And, it supports a modern and secure framework for sharing and collaboration across organizations”, said Dangermond. 

Advantages/Features of the Esri Geospatial Cloud: 

• Storage and Computing Power. The Esri Geospatial Cloud is scalable for big data storage and computation and supports surges during critical events such as disaster response. It can effectively process queries and analyze large datasets, achieving in minutes what would normally take days. 
• Analysis – The Esri Geospatial Cloud supports analysis at the scale of cities, regions, and even the world. The combination of advanced spatial analytics and new artificial intelligence (AI) tools within the Esri Geospatial Cloud help model and visualize complex patterns, relationships, and situations. 

• Services. The Esri Geospatial Cloud supports sophisticated services such as least-cost path navigation for fleet routing and delivery. It enables the creation of solutions for complex problems such as ridesharing and supply chain optimization. 
• Microservices. Esri Geospatial Cloud provides microservices for geospatial functions such as mapping, geocoding, routing, geo-enrichment, data query and editing, data import and export, and spatial analysis. Hence, it makes app development easier and faster to develop and test. It also allows users to effectively scale and power applications across multiple desktops and browser configurations and mobile operating systems. 
• Mobile Application. Esri Geospatial Cloud provides excellent support for mobile apps including offline access to geospatial data in connected or disconnected environments or where connectivity is poor or absent. 
• Big and Real-Time Data. Esri Geospatial Cloud can display on spatial dashboards, trigger real-time responses, organized into massive data stores for subsequent spatial/temporal analytics real-time data streams like from Internet of Things sensor feeds, social media, vehicle sensors, cameras, imaging sensors on drones, airplanes, and satellites. 
• AI, Machine and Deep Learning. The Esri Geospatial Cloud integrates the whole world of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning fueled by geospatial data. Machine learning algorithms run against data stores to automate processing and reveal insights. 

• Out-of the box apps. The Esri Geospatial Cloud is open and provides multiple tools and capabilities for developing apps as well as integrating with other systems. Hence, the Esri Geospatial Cloud can support a whole suite of out-of-the-box apps. These out-of-the-box apps, in turn, can support activities like smart mapping, field data collection, location tracking and routing, and analytics as well as spatial data exploration, situational awareness, and map-based storytelling – story maps. 

For more information, visit go.esri.com/EGC.