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We use the solution for geo-space analysis and geospatial presentation.

We have ESRI ArcGIS Enterprise Cloud, which is in Microsoft Azure. And then all of us who work in geospatial have ArcGIS Pro on our computers. The three components we have are all joined together. When we put data out to the public, they can see it on ArcGIS online. When we're doing analysis and presentation stuff, we're working on ArcGIS Pro, and we push it through to ArcGIS Enterprise, where we can see it internally. From ArcGIS Enterprise, we could put it on our ArcGIS Online if we wanted to.

ESRI's support is brilliant. Moreover, their software is reliable, adaptable, and extensible. They're continually improving and updating and are a world leader in geospatial technologies.

The technical help documentation could be improved. One of the biggest complaints within the GIS community is that, while they do have lots of documentation, it's a bit rubbish. Sometimes, we want answers we can't get, and it's on their software. Very often, you dig into something, but you don't get the answer. You get everything but the answer.

We've been using ESRI ArcGIS for 20 years.

On the whole, the solution is stable. I rate ESRI ArcGIS' stability a seven out of ten. I rate it a seven because they've moved to cloud-based technology, and if we've got a slow network, ArcPro could take forever to load up. That is a real pain. I had a meeting this morning, and we waited half an hour for ArcPro to open. But ArcMap, in the old days, would open in about five seconds.

The solution is stable, but it can be really slow. If you do some extreme analysis, I'm working on between 30 million and 1.7 billion rows of data for the whole UK, and ArcGIS doesn't like it very much. I'm using an alternative because ArcPro would take hours and hours to do it.

The parts of GIS that I work in are nine out of ten. There are more than 50 users in my organization.

They have a brilliant support team. You can speak to the right person within ESRI about the area you're concerned about.

We used QGIS earlier. We switched to ESRI for commercial reasons. When you enter a corporate environment, the probability of them using QGIS is zero. It will be corporate software with corporate support and corporate liability with the software you're using. QGIS is free and open-source. You get data from one place, do something to it, and then sell it to a customer, but if it's all completely wrong, you'd go, "Well, we used QGIS." You need to use something within a corporate framework or with the support of many governments and other corporations. If everybody else is using the same software and getting solid, accurate results, the probability is we're gonna get the same thing. Whereas if you're using free and open-source software, you don't know if you will.

Within ESRI's world, we could talk about several components. You have software called ArcGIS Pro and ArcMap, which are software on your computer. They are easy to set up. And they also have ArcGIS online. Once you've got an account, you log in and have applications available to you. Super easy. It takes minutes for it to be set up.

And then you've got ArcGIS Enterprise, which is a server and takes at least a day to set up. There are many components to it, and it's very complicated.

I have 100% seen an ROI, and I've seen this continuously where there's always a return on investment. The whole piece of software is designed purely about where you bring your data, you work on it, and then, immediately, you've got a value-added product. And then you sell it, or it's already installed.

Their pricing model is not complex. I have a personal account, which costs me £110 a year for a personal, no-commercial-use account, which is fantastic because it opens it up to anybody who wants to learn about GIS and all their technologies.

Regarding commercial use, ArcGIS Enterprise is based on users, what tools you require, and what types of analysis you're gonna do. The price can range between £10,000 and £100,000. You don't have to buy the whole lot. You can just pick what you want. To use ArcGIS Pro, it's only about £100 per basic user. However, you don't get toolboxes. The toolboxes are the added value.

There are additional costs, such as training. The cost is variable. You can attend training courses put on by ESRI, and they vary from £600 to several thousand pounds, where you go away for several days to be trained on various aspects, whether there's software or the topic of GIS. They can do training days, free training, and online training. You could fly to America for a training course.

You can get expert technical help. When you buy your licensing, you can get maintenance, and you get different maintenance levels. The higher the maintenance level you go, you get so many hours of support per year. That support could be them logging in to your network to fix your server. Alternatively, it could be that you can't get a layer to load, and somebody helps you. That's another variable. It can go from £1,000 to £100,000 a year.

I rate ESRI ArcGIS a ten out of ten.

My advice to any company, small, medium, or large, is to find your business requirements before going to ESRI. Then, when approaching ESRI, tell them what you do, what you need to do, and what you will provide. Also, off the record, you need to put your ego in the box and not approach ESRI like you're super rich. "We'll have all the toolboxes, your support, and everything." It's a complete waste of money. It's come up in a meeting, like, "We're never gonna use a toolbox. It's £20,000." No company needs all of the toolboxes. But if you don't know what you want, you could spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on something you'll never use.

We work with ArcGIS for the desktop. ArcGIS is an online platform. The product is the main GIS (Geographic Information System) solution we are using. The most recent update is 10.8.1. It is used for extracting information of interest to location-based services. It does this by integrating digital maps with databases and extracting statistical information based on geography and different geographic levels. It has business applications in marketing and sales for companies that require statistical information based on geography. This is the whole idea of the services we provide.

The reporting features are very interesting and very important. Reporting along with geoprocessing. Several algorithms are embedded in the solution which help to produce reports. So geoprocessing algorithms and very rich reporting are the two main features I believe are most important.

I think that the interface and the importing from external data sources and external databases should be simplified a little bit. The product originates from the engineering world and it is doing more to target business users now. I believe that the user interface and the integration of maps with the external databases could be easier for less technical users. There are other platforms that are doing this better than ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute) Maps for Office. Some products are more targeted towards business users. These models show that the integration of external databases with maps could be simplified more to appeal to those markets. This level of user-friendliness is the main thing that is required by business users.

I have been working with this solution for about 25 years.

I have seen very, very few instances of instability. For all of the years that we have been using the product, we get updates and patches to fix the problems and bugs that are discovered. I would say that there were some cases with bugs in the past which caused instability, but not in the present. Now the product is quite stable.

The licensing is per user for Arc GIS for desktop. Of course, if the licensing is per user, it is scalable. When you want to scale, you just buy another license. With our company, there are two users. Our clients have up to three users per customer.

Because we are communicating with the distributor of ESRI in our territory, Milestone Data Systems, we contact the vendor and not directly to ESRI.

Positive

We previously used a different solution and several years ago we purchased and started using another product. The product was purchased by ESRI back in 2005, if I remember correctly. The name was Atlas GIS from Strategic Mapping. When it was sold to ESRI, it was incorporated into the product lines. So we use more than one product from the same company.

The initial setup was straightforward. There is no problem with that.

In fact, we are integrators and we do implementations for other people. If we need any help, the vendor in our area has support staff available in order to get us some help — if we really need it. Most of the time we do the installation and configurations by ourselves.

The product for desktop is purchased and we pay for the maintenance of the product and that is all. There are no additional costs for technical support which are included in the maintenance fees. The fee structure for the online product will be different.

My advice to other users seeking this type of solution is that the product is very good and quite user-friendly. It could be improved in this sense of user-friendliness for a business user, but it is currently very good for the needs of more technical users and it is improving. It is a complete solution for those who want to examine the geographic implications of his or her queries. If someone needs to see data from the perspective of location, then it is a complete solution. The product offers everything that someone would need in a GIS solution and it can answer any question in terms of geographic dimensions.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as an eight. If you consider all the aspects, it is a very good product that has areas where it can improve. I think eight is fair in my opinion, as it suggests this is a good product and leaves room for the improvements they should consider making.