Strategic Partnership Allows First Responders to Map Resource Allocation
AUGUSTA, Ga. – ESRI, the leader for geographic information systems, and ESi®, Emergency Services integrators, the leader for incident management systems, today announced a strategic partnership to create a new application interface between ESRI’s .Net Developer Framework and ESI’s WebEOC®. This new application, the WebEOC Mapper, enhances spatial representation of incident data, enabling better management of response and recovery efforts and status reporting during times of crisis.
The integration of ESi’s WebEOC incident management system and ESRI’s GIS Platform allows incident managers to create areas such as ad hoc cordons or pre-staging zones and distribute them to first responders. Providing spatially accurate visual information to first responders is mission critical in emergency situations. Spatially-enabled records allow incident response teams to manage and query data through a graphical interface in real time as a crisis situation unfolds. This is essential to determine the population at risk as the scope of an incident grows beyond local to regional.
The platform will give incident commanders and first responders a rich, simple interface to communicate tactically as well as geographically. The service oriented architecture (SOA) allows organizations to customize the platform to meet their unique needs, such as integrating cameras, GPS and other devices. Incident managers will have Geospatial Analysis available by leveraging powerful Geoprocessing models behind the scenes to track all the incidents as they are entered into WebEOC.
“The WebEOC Mapper also allows for not only the tight integration of the products but something more that our customers have been asking for and that is the ability to use their existing GIS data sources. A streamlined process for incorporating data from local departments will give the emergency manager a more detailed and up to date dataset upon which to conduct a response,” said Nadia Butler, director of ESi product development.
“I have been encountering WebEOC everywhere I go and I am excited now to be able to bring the very best ESRI to complement this outstanding product,” said Jeff Sopel, account manager for ESRI.
The WebEOC Mapper will fuse the power of ESRI’s geographic information systems with the functionality and ease-of-use of ESi’s WebEOC product. The new WebEOC Mapper will utilize the geospatial objects of ESRI’s ArcGIS, providing customers and organizations with the tools essential to develop and present a common operating picture and to visualize information critical to emergency response.
In keeping with the WebEOC product line, the integration will provide an easily deployed solution requiring minimal training to meet the rapidly-changing public safety and emergency response environment. The WebEOC Mapper will be released in the third quarter of this year.
About ESRI
Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. ESRI is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit www.esri.com.
About ESi
ESi is an Augusta, Georgia based company offering web-based IT products and systems integration services to the Emergency Management and Public Safety sectors. WebEOCProfessional is a web-based crisis information management system that provides access to real time information that can be simultaneously shared among crisis response teams, decision-makers, and organizations during the planning, response, and recovery phases of a crisis.