On July 11, 2011, Esri has announced the acquisition of Procedural Inc, Zurich.
Years after the nifty but discontinued attempts of the SketchUp 6 / ArcGIS 9.2 Plug-in, ESRI takes the gloves off and finally makes a true jump into 3D cities modeling, planning and design. And finally GIS meets Games Design and vice versa. The rule-based approach of CityEngine apparently tasted right to Esri.
Read the press release.
Here are FAQs for CityEngine customers. Personally, I like the Question “Who is Esri and Jack Dangermond” the most. FYI, Procedural customers: Jack is one of the most interesting personalities I have met and he has a memory for faces and names of several petabytes.
I find it very interesting how Esri’s GeoDesign strategy and the CityEngine technology will merge.
Addendum: Esri Adds 3D Design Tools with Procedural Acquisition by Matt Ball
There is another interesting blog article about ESRI’s purchase of Procedural and possible opportunities for future planning: http://www.geoplanit.co.uk/?p=191
Greetings:The knowledge I have about ESRI and Jack is shoandecnd but this is a man who built the company from the ground up and from all guesses, takes his customer and service of that customer very seriously. Why else would his company carried through this terrible economic recession? A great product and superior customer service.The following piece was published in the NY Times (and I do not currently work for ESRI, just a fan of the mindset.): I have four priorities. The first one is to focus on what customers need and want. And, second, make my company a really great place to work. So when we hire somebody, we have in mind finding a person who really fits so well that they realize their lifee28099s work with us. The third is to make sure wee28099re a very strong business that supports the first two priorities. In a public company, the first thing is taking care of stockholders, and then you keep the employees happy, and then, O.K., the customers. I was very lucky to start this company and keep it my own. And the fourth priority was added about 20 years ago when we started to work seriously with business partners. Today we have about 2,000 business partners all around the world.