Friday March 30th 2007
Filed Under ESRI
Keynotes from STDB Inc., Royal & SunAlliance, and More to Share Best Practices for Improving Business Performance with GIS
Redlands, California―Business professionals will hear how commercial businesses are profiting from integrating geographic, demographic, and customer data at the ESRI Business GeoInfo Summit, to be held April 23–25, 2007, in
Dallas, Texas. Keynote speakers from the real estate and insurance industries will share how using geographic information system (GIS) technology to integrate business information and support problem solving in their industries.
Jay R. Lucas, CCIM and president of STDB Inc., the technology arm of the Certified Commercial Investment Member Institute, will describe the STDBonline real estate portal (powered by ArcGIS Business Analyst Online), which services more than 17,000 commercial Realtors and handled transactions worth more than $200 billion in 2006. “Real estate is all about location, timing, and demographics,” says Lucas. “Using GIS to see information spatially helps provide the knowledge that we need, such as identifying changes in the market, to identify opportunities. Being able to use the GIS platform helps us make the right decisions.” Lucas adds that he decided to use ESRI technology for the STDBonline Web portal while attending last year’s Business GeoInfo Summit and had the new application up and running after a short, six-month effort.Rob Osment, Geographic Risks Manager for Royal & SunAlliance (R&SA), one of the UK’s leading insurance groups, will chart how R&SA is building one of the insurance industry’s largest global enterprise GIS systems for managing the underwriting process and improving the understanding of risks and perils. “Now, we don’t write new business without a GIS analysis,” says Osment. “We have peril models for arson, crime, flood, and subsidence, and we use those models to differentiate the rates that we charge. The insurance industry can make use of every kind of ESRI technology from making a basic spatial analysis to integrating entire underwriting systems and processes.”Additional keynote speakers, such as Lisa Derenthal, expert in GIS applications for home building and real estate, will talk about how GIS technology helps business departments share and visualize information. “This year’s summit will show how GIS is being used to solve many different business problems and is a successful platform for integrating business functions,” says
Simon Thompson, ESRI commercial industry sector manager. “The combination of keynote speakers, workshops, sessions, and exhibits will give business professionals an excellent overview of the value of GIS and how it can provide new understandings and opportunities in their markets.”Sessions will explore the strategies, challenges, and methodologies for developing an enterprise GIS, building a commercial real estate GIS portal, and identifying next generation market planning solutions for retailers. User presentations give attendees an opportunity to learn about actual peer experiences in GIS implementation; using GIS for customer, market, and economic analysis; and more. Exhibitors, including Information Builders and Tele Atlas North America, Inc., will be on hand to demonstrate the latest in GIS business application software and datasets.For those interested in learning technical skills, Dr. David Huff will explain the use of ESRI’s ArcGIS Business Analyst extension to perform his Spatial Interaction Model for predicting consumer spatial behavior. In addition, ESRI and other experts will give technical workshops on using ESRI business applications for site selection, market analysis, and customer profiling and to set up ArcGIS Business Analyst and other Web-enabled services. For more information and to register for the 2007 ESRI Business GeoInfo Summit, visit www.esri.com/geoinfo.# # #
About ESRI
Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the
United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. ESRI is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at
www.esri.com.
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Press Information For Immediate PublicationImage Available Upon Request March 30, 2007Susan M. Harp ESRITel.: 909-793-2853, extension 1-2860E-mail: press@esri.com