Alibaba Cloud is collaborating with Esri, a company that does spatial analytics and geospatial information systems (GIS). The partnership enables both organizations to deliver technology to their joint customers. Esri is working through its authorized distributor in mainland China, Esri China.

Esri and Alibaba Cloud have already collaborated on over 20 deployments of Esri technology inside Alibaba Cloud in China. For example, the Ningxia Land and Resources Bureau built its own geospatial data platform using Esri GIS technology on Alibaba. The customer has consolidated its electronic map data, imagery, survey, and three-dimensional data into a one-stop catalog. The customer built this foundational geographic data platform using Esri’s ArcGIS Enterprise software in Alibaba’s Elastic Compute instances.

Esri is now working closely with Alibaba Cloud to ensure their technologies are interoperable, and they will offer joint solutions later this year.

Esri President Jack Dangermond said in a statement that location intelligence in cloud infrastructure is important for customers to solve real-world problems. “Esri users process massive volumes of data and extract location intelligence out of that data to do big data analytics, raster analysis and geoanalytics,” according to Esri Solution Architect Craig Pitman, in an email to SDxCentral. “Having access to scalable computing, storage, and networking are important to these capabilities."

The agreement between Alibaba Cloud and Esri will bring together engineers from both companies to deliver GIS innovations to the cloud.

California-based Esri was established in 1969. The privately-owned software company employs more than 4,000 staff in the United States. Esri China counts more than 300 employees. And Esri also established an R&D center in Beijing in 2011, which houses 40 software engineers.