The NCI Agency and Esri Global have signed an Enterprise Agreement (EA), successfully completing several years of negotiations.
The agreement consists of an Enterprise License Agreement for the NATO Core Geographic Information System (GIS) with several addendums to cover the use of Esri Software by NATO Functional Area Services (FAS) and NATO Nations that use NATO FAS.
The agreement will facilitate access to NATO core GIS technology and services by NATO FAS and Nations.
It also includes initial on-site support to identify best practices in respect to the use of Esri technology as well as access to comprehensive online training material.
The Agreement is the result of several years of complex negotiations and follows the NATO Enterprise approach. Due to the 5-year term nature of the Agreement NATO will be able to realise significant savings, and will have the benefit of capability planning security of an extended period.
"The potential of this Agreement can be expected to reach far beyond today's use of the NATO Core Geographic Information System and will allow the NCI Agency to implement a true enterprise GIS platform for NATO in the future" says John Teufert, Joint Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Services, Geospatial Branch Head. "This new GIS platform will be able to provide much of today's stove-piped spatial analytical functionality as centralised GIS web-services. This bears the potential for additional significant cost savings in the Command and Control and Functional Area domains."
In coming months, the Geospatial Services Branch will organize an Agency-wide event presenting the details and future implications of this Enterprise Agreement.