Title:  Making Cities Smarter with IBM and Esri 

A city is a system of systems. The more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent we can make these systems, the smarter the city becomes. IT industry leaders ESRI and IBM are bringing their capabilites together to address the challenges faced by cities around the globe. 

Cities are dealing with congestion. They're dealing with aspects of pollution. They're trying to move people; they're trying to move products. They've got the energy, water, all kinds of phyical infrastructure challenges and clearly the need to improve that infrastructure, sustain it, so you are not constantly replacing it and digging up the city, is critically important.

GIS is a core IT system for local government. It helps manage infrastructure and it does this by using geography as a foundation database. By taking real time information like traffic or waterflows, we can actually optimize things and make them more efficient. We can actually apply advanced analytics to mine out patterns and relationships that support better decision making. It supports better communications through maps and geo spatial visualization. It supports better efficiency by optimizing people and time and space whether it be trucks, or field workers or better infrastructure management.

ESRI's decades of experience and depth of knowledge in geo spatial technologies,  location awareness, the ability to define things in 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional environements, is absolutely critical to creating a smarter planet or a smarter city. There's a great marriage  - a great linkage - between the ESRI technologies and everything that ESRI is providing in terms of geo spatial capture, geo spatial anaytics, geo spatial display, together with IBM"s strength and depth of infrastructure technologies that deal with large quantities of data.

IBM's industry leading Maximo Asset Management Software is now spatially enabled with ESRI's industry leading ARC GSI server and IBM Maximo Spatial  - a new realtime, intuitive solution that helps cities become smarter through better asset management. Maximo Spatial helps city departments manage critical infrastructure, and maintain, monitor and respond to problems with all assets in the most efficent way possible. It enables departments to gather, analyze, summarize, and share complex data about the location, condition, and replacement of strategic assets. 

We have projects all over the world going on today. Many of the countries have collaborative projects between IBM and ESRI. Some of the most exciting and smarter city activities that involve the two company's techologies include  Washington DC, City of Chesapeake, San Francisco and an ever growing number of Smarter City projects that are looking at physical infrastucture, looking at water supply, energy delivery. These are all very exciting, leading edge efforts that the technologies of both companies provide. Truly a unique value to our clients.

ESRI is a core technology for making Smarter Cities. I am very proud that we are able to integrate our technology with IBM's stack of tools to be able to build Smarter Cities and a Smarter Planet.

ESRI and IBM. Together helping build a Smarter Planet - city by city. To  learn more visit the urls on your screen.