by Michael Cruz on 2016-02-24
Environmental Systems Research Institute, more commonly known as ESRI, gave a presentation to a crowd at the Redlands Senior Center providing information about their geographic information systems.
Philip Mielke of ESRI led the meeting, informing the group of local projects that have benefited the city of Redlands. Covering topics from crime mapping and prevention to allocating resources for maintenance.
A company that went from a team of ten, to 2,600 people in the Redlands office alone, continues to strive and provide the region with much needed data. Known for years for their desktop software that required an engineer, and took special training to use found them pivoting in a different direction.
Philip Mielke recanted the evolution of ESRI, “About five years ago, we recognized that, keeping GIS in the hands of a select few was really hurting us. What we really wanted to be able to do is empower an entire organization to work with mapping in a variety of different ways, which changed how we’re developing software. So now there's a lot of development towards our newest tool ArcGIS online.”
The now billion-dollar-a-year company once faced off against the 98-billion-dollar-a-year tech giant Google. In true David and Goliath fashion, ESRI stood its ground finding its software much further along than Google could imagine. Google decided it wasn’t worth time and money to displace ESRI.
ESRI is the second largest privately held software company that is “driven by vision instead of the bottom line,” said Mielke.
Working with federal, state, and local governments, ESRI provides much needed mapping data to help companies and local government make better-informed decisions, and even provided the city of Redlands with data for their repaving initiative called the Pavement Accelerated Repair Implementation Strategy (PARIS).
Glen Harrison, a Redlands resident of three years posed the question, “You mentioned the repaving of the streets. Is there a goal to repave every street? A lot of them need it.”
Which Mielke replied, “The biggest issue with that, and that was a project that I worked directly on, to give you an idea of how much it would cost, we ran a little bit of an analysis on it: $78 million. $78 million is about twice our operating budget. Before that we had devoted about anywhere between quarter-of-a-million to half-a-million to be able to fix those streets. So you can understand how under-treated they really were in that case.”
With the information the ESRI geographic information system provided, the City of Redlands then took items from the map, considered major locations, and allocated resources accordingly. The information helped to identify how to prioritize those funds.
The priority was to keep downtown looking nice, so they could keep the streets looking presentable for residents, as well as visitors. Another item on the list was sidewalks and streets in residential areas where schools are located so kids can have a safe walk to school.
Another high priority item was to insure healthcare workers as well as patients stayed safe around healthcare facilities. Redlands will continue to use this data over the next ten years to efficiently and effectively allocate resources.
ESRI provides information to healthcare facilities as well, from the best way to optimize hospital planning to deploying emergency services in the most efficient way possible.
ESRI is also working hand in hand with Loma Linda University making them the two largest employers in the region. Right now Loma Linda University is mapping where people are getting a higher than average rate of cancer in Southern California. They maintain a tumor registry database with the location of where people are getting cancer.
The city of Redlands has 526 latent miles of streets in different states of decay. Each street has its own individual needs for repair. The city also keeps track of 40,000 trees they need to maintain. If you would like to help report information, and aid the city in their efforts you can log onto www.cityofredlands.org/311 or download the app to your smartphone.
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Alternative Headlines:
ESRI and the world of Tomorrow
Imagining a Better World
ESRI Holds Presentation at the Redlands Senior Center
ESRI
Via graphic information systems
Tracking violent gang offenders with mapping
Crime trends over a map interlinking multiple policies dept
Re-paving initiative.
App - Redlands 311 - to better communicate with government.
Determine best way to allocate resources
Graph traffic flow? Any word in implementing tha information into traffic?
Billionaire dollar a year company
ARCHis Online app.
Have all information in one place.
Damage assessment
Status of trees?
How do they work with LLU:
LLU most forward thinking cancer rea search center.
Database fro where people are getting tumors.
Hospital planning management for more rooms available.
Where to send ambulances and most efficiently.
Road replacement; all roads.
78 million dollar estimate to repave a all streets in redlands
Twice opperating budget.
½ a million in allocation budget to fix the streets.
Safer walks to school.
Bike lanes
NASA:
Maintain large amounts of satellites with Noah
Ability to. Distribute data, maps data. Transfer of data from sats to cloud
Federal: 20
state:20%
Local 20%
Private: 40% commercial
Railroad project:
Biggest challenge, prove that it can make money.
Rezoning
5,500 world wide employees
Competitor used to be Google.
Hiking and mapping?
2,000 years of person code logged.
Hacking problems?
Some countries stealing their code and saying its there's.
Replica software.
2 Chinese companies that use their info.
2nd Largest privately held software company.
“driven by vision instead of the bottom line”
Name
ESRI = Enviromental l systems research institute
First stet of work was to map the national forest for Canada.
Mapping natural resources
Learn about Redlands-based Esri at Redlands Senior Center
Join the Redlands Senior Center from 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. Monday, Jan. 25, for a free presentation by Redlands-based software company Esri.
Esri is the second largest privately-held software company in the world. So what do they do? This informative and interesting presentation will provide answers to that question, along with many more. We will also take a look at technology and how it functions in our society today.
For more information, contact the Redlands Senior Center at (909) 798-7579. The Redlands Senior Center is located at 111 W.Lugonia Ave.
City of Redlands press releases and other information are available on the City’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/cityofredlands or on the City’s website at www.CityofRedlands.org