How the rise of mobile and big data are a blessing for one GIS-based business
Increasingly businesses, industries and governments are turning to Geographic Information Systems — the technology of the science of geography — to make better decisions about everything from target marketing to tracking the spread of disease to managing utility outages to property assessment. Put simply, geography is becoming a transformational and disruptive technology.
Alex Miller, president of Esri Canada, has long understood the power of geography in the digital world. Miller founded the company, which provides enterprise GIS solutions to 12,000 organizations across Canada and a wide swathe of industries in 1984. The company enjoyed compound annual growth of 15 per cent until Until 2009, its worst year ever. And even then it managed to grow albeit by 1.5 per cent. Thanks to the rise of mobile and big data, last year was a breakout year for Esri Canada.“We were up 10 per cent last year and 13 per cent this year,” Miller affirmed.
“We are constantly looking to disrupt our existing products. Part of what drives me is what GIS can do to help make our world more sustainable by better managing our land, air, soil, vegetation.”
In the early days, Miller focused on engineering and digital mapping, designing the digital mapping program for the Ontario Government’s Polaris project (“we’re now converting them to a new technology”); parcel editing software for Oxford County, before expanding to plus-one markets, including natural resources and utilities.
Today, 60 per cent of Esri Canada’s business is from the public sector and 40 per cent from the private sector.
“We converted ourselves into a horizontal product,” Miller said. “We were pioneering this technology. That has its challenges but being part of a global organization [Esri] has the advantage of being able to call on a number of resources around the world yet we are still an independent Canadian business.”
Strategic partnerships have been critical to the company’s growth and sustainability, Miller said. “The nature of what we do, the digitization of any industry, has to evolve, people have to evolve, systems have to evolve,” he said.
“We’ve tackled it market by market and instead of trying to do everything by ourselves, we’ve recruited partners who deeply understand a given market. We teach the partner how our platform works. Those partners feed us requirements in addition to customers.”
Environics Analytics is a close partner of Esri Canada and it is through that partnership that Esri Canada broke into the retail market. Environics provides market segmentation data, population forecasts and demographic analysis for Esri Canada to integrate into its platform.
