ArcGIS is a very powerful, industry standard GIS system that provides a comprehensive environment within which users can perform just about any geospatial data creation, management, analysis or visualization function. It is broadly adopted as the GIS platform of choice for many industries and research domains. The tight integration of the various GIS tools and capabilities within the ESRI environment streamline user workflow significantly.
The power of the ArcGIS environment provides a significant barrier to entry to new users and it often takes extensive coursework and hands-on experience to become proficient in using the tools available within ArcGIS. There are occasional stability issues in the application and performance can be quite slow for some functions. While ArcGIS has been a leader in the implementation of support for the standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), support for these services is not typically as robust or user-friendly as for ESRI’s own service model based upon their ArcServer platform.
Overall, ArcGIS remains the industry leader for comprehensive GIS functionality, but there are alternative commercial and open source solutions that may be more appropriate in some circumstances (i.e. need to host OGC services, streamlined support for those services, simplified user interface, etc.).
The ArcGIS platform supports the entire geospatial data workflow. The ArcGIS platform consists of a set of related applications that provide complementary capabilities covering the full range of geospatial data creation, management, publication, processing, analysis, and visualization capabilities.
The ArcGIS platform offers a full set of programming components that support the development of desktop and mobile applications and a server platform that may be used to host data and mapping services for delivery to desktop, mobile, and web-based applications. The ArcGIS for Developers (https://developers.arcgis.com/en/) provides information and support resources for software developers working in the ArcGIS platform.
Geographic information science, widely used in numerous domains. Links to information about ESRI’s products use in many domains is available from ESRI’s “industries” page. http://www.esri.com/industries.html
Commercial software, annual licensing. Academic and home use licensing is available. Some products are available as free applications and a very limited number of applications are available as open source applications. A listing of available products is provided at:
http://www.esri.com/products
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