ESRI and Jane’s Information Group Forge Alliance

10 September 2007, 2:15pm

10 September 2007 - Redlands, California—A new alliance between ESRI and Jane’s Information Group, an IHS company (NYSE: IHS), will give Jane’s customers the ability to extract valuable geospatial intelligence from Jane’s data by giving them new ways to visualize, understand, and exploit the information.

The relationship draws upon each organization’s unique and complementary strengths. ESRI provides geographic information system (GIS) software, technology, consulting, and training and is the world’s leading GIS supplier to the defense and intelligence community. Jane’s, a trusted source of intelligence and insight to the defense and intelligence community for more than 100 years, is the world’s leading commercial open source intelligence (OSINT) organization. This new business relationship creates a new and innovative geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) capability.

Almost all of Jane’s information contains a place and time element, for example, the location and date of an incident or where and when a military facility was built. Jane’s has started adding geographic location tags to all of its data. This geospatial context helps users analyze complex relationships not obvious or possible otherwise, enabling them to identify trends, events, and intelligence within a specific area of interest.

High-quality maps in Jane’s publications, such as Defence Weekly and Jane’s Intelligence Review, will enhance news and features by adding further depth to the information, helping readers better understand the subject.

For Jane’s electronic data, subscribers to its Web and desktop services can fuse and share the geospatial information in a common operating picture via ESRI’s software. This will allow users to view a map where a particular weapon system is deployed. At the same time, customers can draw on Jane’s technical information to model the capability of a weapon system such as mobility and threat domes. For users new to the power of GIS, this easy-to-use capability will add considerable value to Jane’s products.

“We’re delighted to be partnering with such a well-respected organization as Jane’s,” says Jack Dangermond, president of ESRI. “The geographic approach adds additional value to Jane’s data and benefits many organizations in the defense and intelligence community. Jane’s and ESRI have many customers asking us to work more closely together—this is an exciting step forward.”

Michael Dell, deputy CEO, Jane’s Information Group, says, “I’m extremely excited about the opportunities that exist to develop further our services through this partnership with ESRI, which helps deliver on Jane’s strategy to provide ever more strongly embedded electronic information solutions for our professional users. All Jane’s news and events data is now provided with geocoded metadata, which means this partnership opens up a wealth of opportunity for Jane’s customers to view information in a GIS environment. Partnering with ESRI will give Jane’s customers the ability to extract invaluable geospatial intelligence from Jane’s data by giving them new ways to visualize, understand, and exploit the information to enhance their decision making.”

To ensure full support for this global initiative, ESRI, in collaboration with its distributor ESRI (UK), will provide extensive resources to facilitate the new relationship. ESRI’s work will be leveraged worldwide through its global distributor network.

www.esri.com

Geo: International