访谈英文版本：

Q. Now must be a good time to be private. Do you have any plans to acquire any public GIS companies whose share price must have been hit hard recently?
A. No. We’re 40 years old; we’re not really in that space. Occasionally we have acquired small technology firms and integrated them when it was appropriate from an engineering standpoint. Because we’re private and “cash rich” we have no desire to be a public company. Generally we don’t operate in that business model.

Q. What is your business model?
A. The vision has not changed since its inception. We focus on technological innovation; we spend approximately 20% of our revenue, which is almost double a normal IT company, on R&D. That amounts to well over $100m a year. By a large IT company’s standards that is pretty small, but for our world, it’s quite extraordinary. We also focus on being an organisation that supports our users. They listen to us, we listen to them and are responsive to what our users need and want.

Q. What are some of the ways in which businesses are using mobile mapping technologies?
A. The most popular mobile mapping technologies are TomTom in Europe and Garmin in the US. Microsoft, with the acquisition of Navteq, and Nokia will play into that space as well as larger players. But they are all consumer oriented: Where is it? How do I get there? What’s around me? Those are the fundamental consumer questions that require GIS behind them. The success of these organisations has largely been to do with the assembly of high-quality content behind servers or copies of the content cached and put onto a device in a car for example.

ESRI is not a player in the consumer mobile space. But we have released several mobile GIS products designed for professionals. One of these enables companies to take GIS into the field. The organisation will create a server of maps and images, and all mobile workers can download data relevant to their application. With that data, and a GPS mobile device, they can see where they are and edit the data. It’s a complete data loop: download data, caching it, then editing it and sending it back to the server.

Sears, for example, spent $3m on our ArcLogistics system and saved $43m a year. They also cut their fuel costs by 15% and went from 88% on-time deliveries to 97%.

Q. Does it run on the iPhone/BlackBerry Storm/Windows Mobile/Google Android? If not, when will it?
A. We’ve standardised on Windows Mobile as a platform that gives us a level of device independence. We are looking at other platforms, but see Windows Mobile as a primary IT platform for professionals.

Q. The embedded mapping capabilities on websites often come from Google, Multimap and so on. What is ESRI’s niche?
A. Microsoft and Google, and Yahoo to a large extent, are very much consumer-focused. They look at mapping and geospatial visualisation as one more aspect of search. It’s all about spatial search as an augmentation to traditional web search. This is a very exiting field; it concentrates on a global base map for visualisation and association.

They both become active in being able to support embeddable mapping for locator services and they are both spending between $100m - $150m, a year on developing content for that base map. The technology itself is highly optimised for fast visualisation access; it’s not a GIS system.

We don’t focus on consumer technology. Our field and our customers are the professional market; those that actually build the content that can be visualised on the web, or do the analysis. Analysis is where the big pay-offs on GIS arise.

These two companies, particularly Google, have done a wonderful job of opening the world’s eyes to the power of GIS, particularly in the visualisation world. We appreciate that and partner with both companies.

Q. But aren’t Microsoft’s moves in the GIS space helping to turn GIS into a commodity? Is this good or bad news for ESRI?
A. We work closely with all the IT companies on their geospatial-enabling technologies. We like that partnership. The investments that Oracle made in their database and that Microsoft has made in spatialising SQL server means that our customers can enjoy the benefits of integrated technologies.

We go to market with Microsoft selling our server and their server stack and the user does not have to hire a systems integrator to figure it all out, they just work. From a user perspective, linking our technologies with other IT companies’ spatial strategies is very good news.

Virtual Earth is all about supporting their search environment and visualisation. We have partnered with them to resell those map and images services to our customers, so they can enjoy directly as part of their desktop packages web services from Microsoft for a few hundred dollars a year to look at images and maps from anywhere in the world. That dimension from Microsoft is very much content focused. There are lots of interesting connections between their tools and ours.

We have similar connections with Google, IBM and SAP. Our main focus is on our customers, not strategic relationships with other vendors. If we can find things through these partnerships that help our customers to integrate geography and GIS into their solutions, we’ll feel very happy about it.

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