Google and ESRI, Map out a powerful partnership in Federal

Posted by Rob Painter, Senior Federal Manager

The coffee and bagels were great, but it was more than a free breakfast that convinced folks to battle the traffic into downtown DC for the Google Federal User Group meeting. A few hundred government employees and engineers from the aerospace industry gathered in Washington DC to experience firsthand how ESRI's GIS product offering and Google's Earth and Maps enterprise products can powerfully co-exist and inter-operate to deliver an exciting and intuitive user experience.

Michael Bradshaw, Google's Head of Federal and Jeff Peters, ESRI's Federal Director, kicked off the event and set the stage for a number of live demonstrations. First, members of ESRI's technical marketing team walked the audience through a short series of presentations that highlighted ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Server, and data from ESRI's Business Analyst with interactive results seamlessly presented within Google Earth and on Google Maps. The demos showed how someone unfamiliar to DC could find an apartment using Google Earth, ArcGIS server and external web content sources such as Craigslist. The demo also showed how one could edit vector data in ArcGIS by moving and adding nodes within a dataset and then via a network linked KML that referenced an instance of ArcGIS Server, changes in the data were promptly reflected on Google Earth globe. Additional demonstrations showed models combining ArcGIS and Google Earth data on issues such as international health and the socioeconomic risks intrinsic in natural disasters. Google engineers then demoed the new releases of Google Earth Fusion 3.0 and Google Earth Enterprise Client (EC) 4.0. We've previously shared some of our customers’ reactions to the launch of these new Google Earth Enterprise products and posted them on this blog and we also shared some of the specific details of these new products themselves on Google's official Lat Long Blog.

We look forward to continuing to work with ESRI and our customers to leverage the power of geospatial information. If you would like to learn more about our products and how we compliment an ESRI enterprise or want information on how to register for the next Federal User Group meeting or in, contact us here.