Cloud offerings, drone application to drive growth: Esri India

Esri India, part of London headquartered mapping solution provider with a total revenue of $1.5 billion, is expanding its presence in India with new cloud offerings and drone application.

"We launched our cloud offering called ArcGIS, both cloud and on premise, about five years. It is expanding exponentially in India and globally with 4.4 million users," said Esri India President Agendra Kumar.

Esri, a leading provider in geographic information system (GIS) software and solutions business, is competing with other players like Google and Map Authority of India.

The company's Drone to Map software, which came to India two years back, helps to bring the database to ArcGIS base map and it is also gaining traction.

"Drones are being used in applications like electric utilities, especially in electric transmission, in the area of agriculture, in forest applications, road constructions, highway constructions and monitoring the highway among others," he said.

In agriculture it is being used to do survey of different types of crops being grown in how much area. "Using drone the survey can be done on an entire area and it is automated and very easy to carry out," he said.

Besides providing the country's mapping and spatial analysis,  Esri software products and solutions  caters to all GIS requirements. Besides enterprise customers in telecom, weather forecasting and power companies, Esri also does thematic mapping for clients like Survey of India, Geological Survey of India, different state government departments, disaster management agencies and defense establishments.

"There are 3 billion map titles served to the customers every day. In India about 11 billion items are created by our users every day, more than 40 million open data downloads happening. ArcGIS online has 4.4 million users now globally," he said.

The company is also engaged with 20 startups in Bengaluru and  10 to 12 in Hyderabad. "We have association with startups in Chennai and Mumbai," He said.