Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEN)-ESRI Team Wins Contract for NATO's Core Geographic Services Project

ESRI announced today that NATO awarded its Core Geographic
Services contract to the Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEN)-ESRI
team, which will spearhead a project that will shape the application
of geospatial technology in defense for years to come.

The services, technology, and software the contract provides will
ensure that all NATO staff, from the Supreme Headquarters Allied
Powers Europe (SHAPE) to NATO's deployable headquarters (HQ), will
have the best available geospatial information at all times.

Commanders, analysts, and other NATO network users will fuse
geospatial content from Core Geographic Services with other forms of
information for command and control, intelligence, and logistics
applications. The Core Geographic Services form a key architectural
building block in support of NATO's service-oriented architecture
(SOA).

Under Siemens SEN integration and management, this project brings
together ESRI's world-leading geographic information system (GIS)
software with the latest database technology and hardware. At the
heart of the system is ESRI's ArcGIS Server, which provides services
to NATO staff through a Web viewer and to other NATO systems through
standard Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC), interfaces. NATO's
GIS staff will use ESRI's ArcGIS Desktop to conduct complex GIS
analysis and data integration. ESRI's Job Tracking for ArcGIS (JTX)
extension manages and tracks all these GIS workflows and tasks.

NATO's selection process for the contract included a very thorough
demonstration phase to ensure that the selected team could meet
rigorous technical requirements.

ESRI president Jack Dangermond praised NATO for its visionary
approach to the project. "In the proposal request, NATO required a GIS
with a service-oriented architecture that supported OGC standards,"
Dangermond said. "ESRI looks forward to providing NATO with advanced,
state-of-the-art geospatial technology and working with Siemens
Enterprise Communications and OGC to ensure success."

About Siemens Enterprise Communications

Siemens Enterprise started its business with NATO in 1986. The
NATO team in Belgium became the global account within the Siemens
organization for worldwide NATO business. The team is concentrating on
integration of voice, data, and video. Siemens SEN has a large number
of NATO references: more than 200 HiPath PABXs installed at NATO and
more than 30 large system integrations in the different NATO HQs.
Visit Siemens SEN at www.siemens.de/enterprise.

About ESRI

Founded in 1969, ESRI (www.esri.com) is the world leader in the
GIS software industry. ESRI offers innovative solutions that help
users create, manage, analyze, and display information to make timely
decisions and solve problems they encounter every day. ESRI's
comprehensive product line ranges from desktop GIS to GIS for the
enterprise.