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Jennifer Strong (00:04):
If you wanted to know the best place to build a new fire station or maybe a new grocery store, how do you think you'd go about making that decision? In order to consider all sorts of data at once, like what else is nearby, the travel time and population, even things like whether the site is suitable for the job, people often use geographic information system or GIS. Every day people make billions of maps using GIS, and a company called Esri is one of the pioneers of this work. I'm Jennifer Strong, and this is SHIFT. This episode, it's the latest installment of our oral history project.
Jack Dangermond (00:06):
Today, I think on our platform, between four and five billion maps are made every day. And every one of those maps, in some ways, tells a story or is made for something purposeful. And whether it's the largest oil companies in the world trying to figure out how to move to renewables, or whether it's, uh, the nature conservancy, figuring out what lands to conserve, these are neat engagements. My name is Jack Dinjeman. I'm president of SRI. Well, in some ways, it's the company that nobody ever heard about does important work that affects almost everybody. That's one way to think about it. I was originally a landscape architecture student and then got into geography and then, uh, into computing and well, then into GIS and then into ESRI. It is a software company today that builds a product known as ArcGIS that is used by, I think it's 680,000 organizations, one of which is the city of Los Angeles or city of New York or city of Beijing or Paris.
Jack Dangermond (01:15):
All the states basically here in the US, also virtually every federal agency. And then in the private sector, people like Starbucks or Nike or, uh, Walmart or Walgreen, they all basically run their organizations based on geography, the science of our world. And in many ways, GIS is a technology which digitizes geography or puts it into a digital frame. These are tools that are used to help organizations make their, their work better. So they acquire our tools to make maps in some cases, but more importantly, to do analytics of geography behind the maps. For example, where to locate a Starbucks store in the best place or where to conserve endangered species or, or, or where to conserve lands that would enrich biodiversity on the landscape. These are both public sector and private sector decisions that are made thousands of times every day. And these GIS tools basically frame the decision making.
Jack Dangermond (02:21):
They help people pick the right locations, uh, the where, actually, factor. They also help people manage their assets like electrical utilities, manage all their wires, and the sewer and water companies manage their pipes and distribution. And then there's these odd things that happen and with great regularity these days like hurricanes and fires and earthquakes that require organizations like FEMA to be able to jump in and provide emergency response. And people like the Red Cross, they use our tools to take their volunteers and help people during these times of crisis. So I guess I'm trying to give you a kind of broad portfolio that, uh, pretty much every organization that does things on geography uses our tools to organize their, their assets or their data, to look at demographics in reference to their data, to look at climate in reference to their data, therefore get smarter in the way that they act.
Jack Dangermond (03:19):
This has been basically the core of our business for 55 years. Well, it started, uh, when I was a student, I became interested in computer map making and it was centered at Harvard University. There were some other people around the world that were doing it as well, but they had a lab there. And I was very fortunate to get into Harvard as a student, but also work in that laboratory. And the half a dozen people that were inventing some of this first technology, people like Howard Fisher and Carl Steinetz, uh, these were sort of both theoreticians, but also practical people that were inventing these basic tools. And the tools were not fancy like we have, I'd say today, but they were crude approximations, but had a lot of the concepts that we actually are applying today. And they were inventing the abstraction of geography into the computer.
Jack Dangermond (04:15):
And I don't think we used such fancy terms in those days, but that's what it really amounted to. And there were a few others in this field. Roger Tomlinson, one of my dear friends and colleagues up in Canada, invented the name Geographic Information Systems, and he built a, a Canadian information system, CGIS, I think he called it, that was the first automation of things like forests and natural resources across the whole country. And of course that became the kind of model, both in the academy, but also in the world for what might be done. And this was raising, using very crude technology in the '60s as we used a, a Harvard lab as well, but it was enough. Well, it was certainly enough to get me very excited as a student. And after I graduated, my wife and I came back here to Redlands, California and started this organization called ESRI.
Jack Dangermond (05:11):
For probably 10 or 11 years, we basically took the concepts that we had played with at Harvard, some of the tools from there, but also wrote some of our own and did projects, one project at a time, helping people locate a power plant or a new town in the jungle of Venezuela or, uh, doing environmental studies or land use planning work. And we worked a lot in Japan, a lot well around the world, but especially here in the US. At the end of that decade, people began to notice our work and people would say, "Well, Jack, can I, can I have your tools?" In those days, the tools were what I guess I would characterize as homemade software. There was no such thing at, in the '70s really as products, software products like Oracle or Autodesk.
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They all came later, but so we had to think about how we would provide our tools to others.
Jack Dangermond (06:05):
And we sold our source code a few times to academics and to a couple of companies and agencies, but it wasn't well done. And so people were complaining a lot actually of the quality and the lack of documentation. So we had a, we got our, our customers together and I think there were 11 of them that came to California at the time. And they told us, they sort of like held a mirror up in front of our face. Well, we said, "Well, we're not a software company. We're just, you know, we gave you our code." And so they all offered to subscribe to a product if we built such a product. So we said, "Okay, I guess we will do that." That's the short story. Uh, we were very fortunate to get several software developers who are true software engineers, one of which was very gifted Scott Morehouse.
Jack Dangermond (06:57):
He joined our staff from the same Harvard lab in 1981, I believe. And his idea was not to do project work, but to actually engineer a product that would work all the time, productization of the basic science and technology that we'd been working on for years. And, uh, we called it Arc Info, and it sold a few times in the first year. I think we sold four copies of it. And that was interesting as a business. It was a startup, basically, uh, a re-startup of Esri. Up to that time, everything was work for hire, but this was, we sold the product and then we had to support it. We had to invent documentation for it. And then 26 copies, and then 76 copies. And each year, it progressively grew. Today, we have 680,000 customers, actually. Some of those customers are sub-customers, like City of New York has a couple dozen customers, you know, water department, planning department, and so on.
Jack Dangermond (07:57):
Uh, but these are scattered all over the world in all but about four or five countries who have embraced our basic tools as a platform. Now, our success in this has been very strong engineering investments. I mean, we take our customers' money, but we spend it all on R&D. So we spend about a third of our revenue coming in on advancing the methods. And this means leveraging other technologies like computing. We started on mainframes, minis, workstations, PCs. Now on the web with cloud, we've had to stay current with other technology innovations. But then we also have several thousand engineers in our product area that work on advancing our basic tools and areas of visualization or analytics or data management. Now we're embedding and integrating AI and machine learning. We're empowering our users with this additional set of capabilities. Doing these projects, very exciting. I mean, locating a town in the jungles, working in, in Nigeria, helping locate the, their new capital, Abuja.
Jack Dangermond (09:08):
These were projects where we had to collect all the data, doing design work in Japan, locate the new Osaka Airport. All, all of these were interesting studies because we got to travel and be real, I guess I'd say explorers and geographers gathering the data and doing the actual work. You just couldn't sleep at night because there was so much interesting work to be done. And as you would imagine, the geography, well, it takes you everywhere because geography is everything. I just had a, an encounter with one of our employees, a new one here, and I asked him, "What is he working on?" He says, "Everything." Took me by surprise because of course he's working on geography, which is everything. I enjoyed that part of my career, but also the notion of, of building a product from scratch, leveraging other thinking, uh, having partnerships, then moving into the idea of serving users doing their work was thrilling because now I get to see what all these people are doing.
Jack Dangermond (10:10):
And I mean, they are advancing science. They're making people like UPS, you know, last year they saved $400 million by routing their trucks better. About 20 years ago, they started a kind of revolution in the Middle East by creating smart cities by bringing all their different departments together. Having the opportunity to participate with, uh, Mohammed Wardi, who was one of the big leaders there in the UAE, and conceiving of that idea and bringing it together and making it real was thrilling to me. Or let's say, uh, one of the initiatives that my wife made was to push hard on Ebola. When it first started, she had the insight to say, "This is not good." So we volunteered a lot of work and time, worked with WHO to shut it down through quarantining systems. Speaking about health, I was thrilled at what happened at John Hopkins University with a young student who set up one of our map servers.
Jack Dangermond (11:09):
It served 1.3 trillion maps. Maybe you saw it showing the spread of COVID around the world. I don't know. There's, all of them are interesting to me so it's not now just one. I have often questioned myself whether I'm successful, especially in the first 10 years, are we being successful? Now I, I'm starting to realize that I, I've been successful at, at doing what Esri does. And that isn't an ego thing. It's just like, uh, I'm finally less insecure about my life. Not that I'm taking it easy, no, just, uh, I feel a little more comfortable with myself.
Jack Dangermond (00:02):
From a technical perspective, we have gone through different stages of technology from mainframes to many computers, PCs. With each new invasion like this, there's been a huge expansion of our work. The PC, uh, really expanded it to, you know, a million or so users. Uh, that was very exciting. And now in the cloud, it's going to many, many more. It's affecting many people. So as I see the technology evolving, it means many servers serving their maps and their data out and being able to search for these servers and bring them together so that the map data on each separate server can be overlaid and used
for decision making. Let me just make it more real. The weather service is a map layer that's moving in dynamic. It's brought into FEMA and into states and local governments to overlay on top of their own geographic data so they understand the impact of weather.
Jack Dangermond (01:04):
Or if we look into the future climate, you know, we can forecast now approximately what it's gonna be like in 2050 and some even, even further, depending upon what we do with respect to shutting carbon down. This is interesting because you can see that people will begin to behave different based on collective knowledge or collective spatial intelligence. It's going to change how we act. So my big vision, what we are continuing to drive on, is not GIS for individuals or even GIS for enterprises, although that's a big part of our work, transforming organizations so that they integrate using geography. Their business data, their science data, their customer data is all coming together to be an enterprise GIS, much like they do with business systems like ERP or Salesforce or Oracle. There are enterprise systems. Well, GIS is becoming a enterprise system where all the parts of organizations that are, that are geographic, and by the way, that's everything, can be brought together so that companies or organizations or agencies can behave better as an organization.
Jack Dangermond (02:14):
Consumer businesses, insurance companies, they can better insure, or park service or DNC can better understand their whole world.
Jack Dangermond (02:24):
Okay, those are still stovepipe individual systems. Where I see this going is these people are sharing their data on the web so that the data can be served and overlaid dynamically. Think of it as overlaying maps. And so we can collectively use each other's knowledge and use it so that collectively in collective decision making, we can target better. And what is exciting to me about geography is that it allows us in a common framework, the framework of where, to consider social factors, economic factors, environmental factors as map overlays so that we can look at problem solving holistically. We're moving in the world from the world where we were at the effect of nature, you know, hurricanes coming, rainfall, food, emergency, to we have to become the stewards of our world. And that means taking responsibility for both understanding the systems that are in play and also nurturing them and, and, uh, directing them.
Jack Dangermond (03:34):
This is like a global nervous system we need. GIS is in, in many ways on the web, like a global nervous system, measuring everything and bringing it together like your brain does in your nervous system and then acting more intelligent.
Jack Dangermond (03:51):
The great problem to me, Jennifer, today is the lack of understanding and agreement about what's so. Together with our inability to collaborate is sort of a polarization, um, and the politics is, is feeding that. And it's greatly disturbing because it's contrary to everything I believe in, science-based rational systems thinking and also, uh, in other words, the truth understanding together with using maps as a language to facilitate collaboration. You know, when people get around a map, they tend to talk about things. And whether it's in their community, they can see patterns of crime or price of housing or barks or water or. So my big hope is this dilemma that we're in now of polarization calmed down so that people can take more rational decision making about what we should do. Understanding as Richard Saul Warman, founder of Ted once said, "Precedes action. Understanding precedes action." So we're in the understanding business to make it clear that's what GIS is really all about.
Jennifer Strong (05:14):
This episode was produced by me and Emma Silicons and mixed by Garrett Lang with original music from him and Jacob Gorsky. Thanks for listening. I'm Jennifer Strong.