Esri entered a collaborative agreement with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of the Alibaba Group, that will enable both organizations to deliver enhanced options to customers seeking to implement Esri technology on Alibaba Cloud.

Esri President and Founder Jack Dangermond described the agreement as a recognition of successful implementations and a shared belief that location intelligence in cloud infrastructure was pivotal to addressing customers’ needs and solving real-world problems—especially those that need scalable computing, storage and networking capabilities.

“We’ve seen our users achieve amazing results already with Esri technology in Alibaba Cloud,” said Dangermond. “This has been possible as both organizations have engineered interoperable and compatible technology, based on industry standards. The agreement will now bring our engineers together to collaborate on shared initiatives that deliver the next wave of location intelligence innovation on the cloud.”

Esri China’s President, Frances Ho, has witnessed the rapid migration of location intelligence capabilities to cloud infrastructure, and believes that this will continue. “Organizations are rapidly adopting GIS and combining it with the capabilities of cloud technology,” said Ho. “Our users already rely on ArcGIS Enterprise and Alibaba Cloud to do this reliably and efficiently, using world-class innovation from our GIS experts in China, the United States and around the world.”