ESRI is First GIS Vendor to Join HP OpenWarehouse Alliance Program; ESRI's SDE on HP Platforms Offers Powerful Data-warehousing Solutions.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 5, 1996--Hewlett-Packard Company today announced that Environmental Systems Research, Inc. (ESRI) is the first geographic information systems (GIS) vendor to join HP's OpenWarehouse Alliance Program. The program was created to support relationships that would help satisfy HP's growing customer demand for best-in-class data-warehousing solutions, such as ESRI's Spatial Database Engine (SDE) product. ESRI has long been a key partner in HP's Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Program.

Increasingly, GIS applications are being integrated with traditional management information systems (MIS) and information technology (IT) applications. GIS customers in government; telecommunications; transportation; utilities; petroleum; and commercial businesses, such as retail and insurance, are building data warehouses to manage large-scale applications. These applications include facilities management; remote sensing (atmospheric, oil and gas); and business (sales planning, resource tracking, inventory management and customer service).

"HP selected ESRI for its OpenWarehouse Alliance Program because ESRI's SDE product is well-suited to data-warehousing applications," said John Kragness, manager of HP's OpenWarehouse Alliance. "In addition, ESRI is a proven leader in providing GIS software systems, and it has a long-established relationship with HP. HP's OpenWarehouse customers have a critical requirement to view data in their stored warehouses in a manner that is visually easy to understand. HP and ESRI are helping them do that by translating stored data to easily utilized geographical information."

SDE is an object-modeling and data-management tool integrated with a high-performance, scalable spatial database. Built on an open-systems, heterogeneous client/server architecture, SDE permits rapid access and rendering of stored data sets according to user-specified geometric data models or object types. Using this tool, users can easily obtain and manipulate spatial-attribute data, such as all roads in the United States, all land-parcel records for one state, all wells owned by an oil company, all stands of trees for a forestry company and so forth. Spatial objects include various classes, such as point, linear, area and network, as well as user-defined nonspatial-attribute data types (integer, date and binary large object [BLOB]). Data sets and attribute information are contained within a single, continuous database with multiuser access.

"Outstanding performance is one of the key benefits of our SDE technology," said Jack Dangermond, president of ESRI. "Our partnership with HP -- an organization known for performance and reliability -- is simply another demonstration of our commitment to providing high value and customer satisfaction."

All SDE features are indexed by layers that run on a relational-database management system (RDBMS), currently Oracle 7.2. Running above the RDBMS, SDE is transparent to the end user and to the application developer.

ESRI was founded in 1969 as a research group devoted to improving methods of handling geographically referenced data. Today, ESRI is the leading developer of GIS software, with more than 100,000 clients worldwide. ESRI also provides consulting, implementation, and technical support services. In addition to its headquarters in Redlands, Calif., ESRI has regional offices throughout the United States, international offices and distributors in more than 70 countries, and more than 500 resellers and developers. ESRI's goal is to provide users with comprehensive tools to help them quickly and efficiently manage and use geographic information to make a real difference in the world around them. ESRI can be found on the World Wide Web at www.esri.com.

Hewlett-Packard Company is a leading global manufacturer of computing, communications and measurement products and services recognized for excellence in quality and support. HP has 108,300 employees and had revenue of $31.5 billion in its 1995 fiscal year.

Additional information on HP's technical workstation and server solutions is available on the Internet through the World Wide Web at http://www.wsg.hp.com.

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