Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute) is an international supplier of geographic information system (GIS) software, web GIS and geodatabase management applications. The company is headquartered in Redlands, California.
The company was founded as the Environmental Systems Research Institute in 1969 as a land-use consulting firm. Esri products (particularly ArcGIS Desktop) have 40.7% of the global market share. In 2014, Esri had approximately a 43 percent share of the GIS software market worldwide, more than any other vendor.
The company has 10 regional offices in the U.S. and a network of more than 80 international distributors, with about a million users in 200 countries. The firm has 3,800 employees globally, and is privately held by its founders. In 2006, revenues were about $660 million.[8] In a 2016 Investor's Business Daily article, Esri's annual revenues were indicated to be $1.1 Billion, from 300,000 customers ($4000/customer/year).
My research interests are spatial data infrastructure, with emphasis on the study of geography (B.S. and M.S. in Geography from University of South Carolina). I have worked at Esri in Redlands, CA for four years as a consultant, helping large organizations manage and share their spatial data. Last Fall, our company decided to release the Esri Geoportal Server product as 100% open source, under the Apache 2.0 license on sourceforge.
