ESRI Spatial Database Engine Available On Sun Network Computing Platform; Powerful New Tool for Government Agencies, Telecoms, Utilities To Manage Geographic, Spatial Databases

Business Wire, Sept 7, 1995

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 7, 1995--ESRI, Inc., the world's leading supplier of geographic information system (GIS) software, is introducing its breakthrough Spatial Database Engine (SDE) on the Sun Microsystems(TM) scalable, multiprocessor network computing platform, both companies announced today.

Government agencies at every level -- federal, state, county, municipal -- telecommunications companies, utilities and other organizations will now be able to more easily access and manipulate huge databases of spatial and geographical data used for everything from apping, zoning and land use planning (for governments) to site planning and "call before you dig" operations (for telecommunications companies).

ESRI's SDE product enables companies to access and manage enormous spatial data sets allowing the manipulation of millions of spatial features that occur in geographic databases, such as wireline schemes, customer point locations and land parcels. Examples of such large databases include land parcel databases that detail land and plant features for an entire state (or even several states) and databases of telephone customer locations.

ESRI's SDE will initially be compatible with Oracle's Rev. 7.0 Relational Database Management System with the Spatial Data Option (formerly Oracle7 MultiDimension). For traditional GIS users, SDE combined with a Relational Database Management System, such as Oracle's, will offer efficient client/server access to relational databases. Companies using both relational and spatial databases independently, such as telecoms and utilities, can now combine that data into unified databases accessible throughout the enterprise.

"Sun's SPARC(TM)/Solaris(TM) platform is particularly well suited to a complex and powerful product like SDE because of its scalable multiprocessor architecture, which offers high I/O and is very flexible," said Boran Loncaric, telecommunications marketing manager at ESRI. "In the multi-user telecom environment, as with data warehousing applications in general, this ability to scale up with the data sets is critical to the speed and effectiveness of an application."

Exploiting Sun's open network computing architecture, SDE will enable hundreds of clients from multiple locations to access, manipulate and manage massive spatial data sets stored in an appropriate RDBMS at subsecond rates through a TCP/IP network. The open, interoperable client/server environment allows the user to manage and integrate large data sets from different sources much more efficiently than is possible in a mainframe-based legacy GIS environment. The open design means that spatial files, for example, can be more easily exchanged between a phone company and local, state and federal government agencies.

"SDE is a breakthrough product that leverages Sun's multiprocessor SPARC architecture and multithreaded Solaris software environment -- both of which optimize our RDBMS performance," said Douglas Ehrenreich, director of telecommunications and cable market development at Sun Microsystems Computer Company. "In the telecom market, that means faster, more effective command and control and customer care applications across the board. Perhaps more importantly, it opens the door to some really interesting possibilities as spatial data becomes a more integral part of the corporate data store."

Examples of applications areas that will benefit from the integration of spatial and relational databases include, for governmental agencies, zoning, mapping, land use planning, waste materials management and demographic research. For telecoms and utilities, SDE will prove very useful for site planning, traffic analysis and modeling, "call before you dig" operations, operations support, help desk tracking, sales territory management, emergency dispatching and demographics-based marketing.

Based in Redlands, California, Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI), was founded in 1969 as a research group devoted to developing methods of handling geo-referenced data. The leading developer of GIS software, with more than 100,000 clients worldwide, ESRI also performs consulting and data automation services related to geographic information management. ESRI maintains a network of U.S. and international offices as well as more than 100 distributors of its products around the world.

Sun Microsystems is a leading supplier of network computing systems to telecommunications service providers and equipment manufacturers. Sun Microsystems Computer Company is a world leader in the design, manufacture and sale of network computing systems and is a division of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Recognized for quality and innovation, the company's SPARC(TM) workstations and multiprocessing servers each hold the No. 1 UNIX(R) marketshare position. These systems are used primarily by businesses, educational institutions and governments worldwide for technical, commercial, industrial, and software development applications. -0-