Three-Year Agreement to Improve Data Access for Effective Policy Making

Redlands, California— February 08, 2011—Working with Esri distributor Informi GIS A/S, the European Environment Agency (EEA) has signed a three-year Esri enterprise license agreement (ELA). This agreement will help the EEA deliver open access to data for more informed decision making about the environment. It will also improve integration of environmental considerations into economic policies, contributing to Europe's sustainability efforts.

"Continuing to work with Esri and its partners allows us to deploy the technology necessary to support important initiatives efficiently and expediently," says the EEA executive director Jacqueline McGlade.

The EEA is an established user of Esri's geographic information system (GIS) technology. It signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Esri in July 2010 for technology development, including cloud GIS. Under the new ELA, the EEA is able to share its environmental data more easily, allowing nations, agencies, scientists, and policy makers to view and analyze a wealth of data.

"The EEA has an impressive vision for using geographic data throughout its work to support better decision making," says Esri president Jack Dangermond. "This ELA makes it possible to discover and analyze valuable information for both policy makers and the general public."

During the next year, the EEA, Esri, and Informi GIS will work together to

• Develop a cloud architecture serving the EEA's initiatives and European Union (EU) directives.
• Share data in line with the principles of EU's Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) spatial data infrastructure initiative.
• Create a collaborative plan that supports information sharing about the environment throughout Europe as part of the Eye on the Earth initiative.

To view and analyze the data the EEA has available, visit ArcGIS.com.

About Esri

Since 1969, Esri has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS technology, 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 esri.com/news.

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