INDUSTRY

Redlands, California - ESRI, the leading developer of geographic information system (GIS) software, announces that Gaz de France, a French gas utility company, is expanding its Commercial Information System (SIC) with GIS software from ESRI France, ESRI's French distributor. The new system, which is called GEOSIC, will provide the Gaz de France sales force with powerful tools for geographic analysis and visualization. In 2000, Gaz de France decided to develop a spatial database that would both guarantee the longevity of its data warehouse, independent of technology choices for client software, and comply with SICs technology strategy with a focus on creating data for data mining applications. In Phase One of the project, the national and regional marketing operations offices of Gaz de France were equipped with ESRIs ArcView desktop GIS software. After geocoding client base addresses and communities and performing spatial overlays with the distribution network, ArcView was used for target marketing, support for commercial strategies, and sector planning for the extension of the distribution network. After successfully completing Phase One at the end of 2001, Gaz de France with ESRI France initiated the second phase of its GEOSIC system, which was to establish a nationwide Intranet application for its 1,500 sales agents that would allow them to interactively qualify network connection requests from consumers, businesses, and government. Upon the successful completion of a nine-month pilot project in the west of France, Gaz de France contracted with ESRI France to complete GEOSICs Intranet implementation. The Intranet application is based on ESRIs ArcIMS and ArcSDE software, running on UNIX WebLogic and ESRIs native Oracle Spatial connector technology. This architecture also hosts the GEOROUTE-RASTER mapping data for France, co published by Cartosphere and the Institut Géographique National (IGN), which is maintained by Gaz de France as a raster-based reference for the GEOSIC data warehouse.