Esri History
ESRI was the brain-child of Jack Dangermond. Over 40 years ago he started the business developing mapping tools. It now has an annual turnover in excess of $1.2bn and over 300,000 customers.
This makes it the fifth largest privately-owned technology company in the world, supplying Geographic Information Systems technology to organisations to enable them to make complex decisions about location.
For a more detailed history of Esri, read on, or click the link below for an article in the FInancial Times:
Mapmaker follows his own path: Jack Dangermond and Esri
After leaving Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, Jack Dangermond founded The Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (Esri) in Redlands, California by Jack Dangermond and his wife, Laura.
The early mission for Esri was to help land planners and resource managers make environmental decisions by bringing organised geographic information and analysis. In the early days map-based analysis at Esri consisted of US Geological Survey maps overlaid manually with clear plastic sheets, gridded with cell assigned values, often in multiple layers. Maps were created with a pen plotter using mainframe computer generated information from values entered on keypunch cards.
This method evolved as Esri became involved in many US projects, including polygon information overlay systems (PIOS), and ultimately Geographic Information Systems (GIS). These created a radical new, visual way for people to approach problems that brought quicker and better results.
It was a logical progression to use software to automate the manual processes Esri had developed, and concepts were formulated that ultimately led to the 1982 release of the first commercial GIS system: ARC/INFO.
ARC/INFO had many of the features we see today, a database management system that assigned attributes to geographic features, such as points, lines, and polygons, displayed on a computer.
The advent of cheaper and faster computers, developments such as network processing, and in particular new data capture techniques such as remote sensing and GPS saw Esri grow rapidly through the 1990s, and on to this day. Also contributing to growth have been Esri's burgeoning business partner and developer programs, which lead to further customized solutions.
In the late 1990s ARC/INFO was developed into a modular, scalable GIS platform. The result was ArcGIS, a solution for both desktop and enterprise. Subsequent developments have seen ArcGIS for Server, the data management component for Esri's ArcGIS software family. This enhancement allows GIS delivery to large numbers of users using current networks, with tasks completed desktops and published online and propagated throughout the enterprise.
Esri has continually evolved through embracing technological change. Today is no different. Web and Web GIS figure heavily. Collaborations, sharing commercial services, mashups, and data replication services have become practical and GIS is becoming more distributed, multiparticipant, and open.