GIS Capabilities Available to Anchorage Water

01 September 2009, 4:06pm

Redlands, California — September 1, 2009 — Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility (AWWU) enabled broader accessibility to its geographic information through an enterprise license agreement (ELA) with ESRI. Acknowledged as one of the best water and wastewater service providers in the United States and a recipient of ESRI's Special Achievement in GIS Award, AWWU recognized it needed to be more flexible and adaptable to geographic information system (GIS) demand as it arose.

According to the terms of the ELA, the Utility has unlimited access to deployments of ESRI's ArcGIS platform of desktop, server, Web, and mobile solutions. Since its inception in April 2009, the ELA has produced immediate benefits for AWWU, especially in the mobile workforce, where the GIS deployments now have a broader reach.

Also included in the ELA are subscriptions to ESRI Developer Network (EDN), training and support, and complimentary registrations to ESRI's International User Conference. Tina Miller, AWWU GIS Manager, said a direct advantage of the ELA was the ability to send 14 staff members through online training without an additional cost to the Utility¾a savings of more than $3,000 realized within days of signing the agreement.

Additionally, AWWU achieved immediate savings with the implementation of its 2008 Architecture Plan, which called for more ArcGIS Server licenses. Without the ELA, this would have been cost prohibitive and the project would have been delayed. This type of cost containment pleases Dr. Howard Marsh, AWWU CIO/IT Director. "The ELA lets me deploy ESRI technology when I need it and where I need it without worrying about the consequences of deploying more copies," says Marsh.

"With limited budgets and personnel, organizations such as AWWU are expected to sustain themselves and still provide a high level of operations management and customer service," says Terri Morganson, ESRI Alaska Account Manager. "The AWWU staff and CIO clearly saw this program as an excellent fit, and the ELA has enabled them to deploy solutions in a timely manner to help meet these challenges."

ESRI's ArcGIS software, an open, scalable, and interoperable architecture that provides a complete system to author, serve, and use geographic information, forms the foundation of the ELA program for AWWU. The agreement includes complete flexibility of ArcGIS deployment. Organizational workflows can be simplified because ArcGIS technology complies with IT standards and uses off-the-shelf, commercial relational databases and standard data models.

ESRI ELAs

Geo: International