Geological Survey virtually every city and county in the U.S. Customers include the White House, FEMA and the U.S. Last year Google pulled the plug on a halfhearted push into enterprise maps and began moving its customers to Esri.Įsri owns more than half of the market for so-called GIS (short for "geographic information systems") software, and its technology is used around the world by some 350,000 businesses, government agencies and NGOs, which collectively create 150 million new maps every day. But if you are, say, the Bavarian police charged with securing the G7 Summit near Munich and need a detailed real-time dashboard that can pinpoint every delegation, police officer, emergency vehicle, first responder, protest site, road closure, mountain trail and access point to the summit's venue, you'll use Esri. Google is great for directions or locating your home on Zillow. But as Google aimed its maps mostly at consumers, Esri was able to hold on to its revenue base among power users in business, government and other organizations. As he cemented Google dominance in maps, he helped to create what many thought was the biggest existential threat Esri ever faced. Products like Google Earth, Google Maps and Google Street View, Hanke says, "were built on the shoulders of what he created." "He kind of created the industry," says John Hanke, who for six years led Google's mapping efforts. Esri, which is still privately held by the Dangermonds, had $1.1 billion in sales in 2014, and FORBES estimates its value at $3 billion.
Dangermond deftly adapted Esri software over the years, from minicomputers to workstations and then to PCs, the Internet, the cloud and mobile devices. But long before Google was born-even before its founders were born-it was Dangermond who essentially invented the digital map.Įsri, the company he founded with his wife, Laura, in 1969, has toiled in relative obscurity to become one of the more improbable powerhouses in tech, having survived wrenching shifts in computing that destroyed scores of its fellow tech pioneers. Google Maps has become part of modern life, getting you from here to there efficiently, pinpointing the location of your Uber. He then moved aside to make way for the man who built GeoHub: Jack Dangermond, a lanky white-haired 70-year-old billionaire who is the unlikeliest of tech moguls. GeoHub, Garcetti said, would help to "improve the quality of life" in Los Angeles. Similarly, an NGO providing homeless services might see how encampment locations are affected by police activity or liquor store openings.
Garcetti described how after an earthquake a firefighter equipped with an iPad might immediately be able to find fire hydrants, sewer lines, electrical equipment, building infrastructure and the location of other emergency responders. But for the first time a major city had built a real-time digital dashboard that would allow anyone-city workers, the public, NGOs, startups, the media-to access and mash up those maps. Maps, of course, are vital tools of municipal business everywhere, be it in planning, transportation, public safety, public works, economic development and more. On the last Friday in January Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti gathered in front of a group of reporters and government officials to unveil his city's latest tech initiative: GeoHub, a digital mapping portal aimed at reinventing how L.A.