Geographic Analysis Capabilities Help Businesses Understand Where to Invest

Redlands, California—December 21, 2009—The latest version of ESRI Business Analyst Online includes new business search capabilities and tools for more refined market research, giving business owners a thorough understanding of markets, customers, and competition.

A new and unique feature of Business Analyst Online is the comparison report. This gives users the ability to compare prospective sites to one another or to geographies in which they are located and benchmark sites against a successful site or geography. They can also compare multiple competitor locations against their own and view detailed income, population, housing, and household information for each location.

Business Analyst Online now has integrated Bing business search. This new feature allows users to search for any type of business and refine search results—for example, by street or store name—before adding the locations to a map or exporting to Excel. Users can easily find their competitors and locate businesses they can target for their products or services. Additionally, Bing online search capabilities provide users with access to the latest business listings, ensuring decisions are made using the most accurate and up-to-date information available.

Business Analyst Online also now includes a Compare Sites option for quick comparison of two areas' demographic data. Users can save time by quickly identifying the most promising sites before generating more comprehensive report packages and comparisons.

Business Analyst Online is a Web-based solution that combines geographic information system (GIS) technology with extensive demographic, consumer spending, and business data for the entire United States to deliver on-demand, boardroom-ready reports and maps.

For more information about Business Analyst Online, visit www.esri.com/bao.

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 us at www.esri.com/news.



Contact:

Matthew DeMeritt, ESRI
Tel.: 909-793-2853, extension 1-2930
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