Top Executives from Allant and General Motors to Tell How Their Businesses Benefit from GIS; Third Annual ESRI Business GeoInfo Summit Will Offer Powerful Keynotes

REDLANDS, Calif.--March 28, 2006--Top executives will be speaking at the 2006 ESRI Business GeoInfo Summit being held April 30-May 2, 2006, at the Boston Marriott Copley Place in Boston. This conference gives attendees the opportunity to meet business geographic information system (GIS) vendors and network with other professionals from all aspects of retail business, insurance, banking, manufacturing, and real estate.

Keynotes will include Don Hinman, executive vice president and senior principal for Allant Professional Services, and Richard E. Stier, executive manager of Strategic Network Planning, Dealer Network Development, General Motors (GM).

Hinman leads strategic development to help leverage Allant's Predictive Intelligence engines; strategic and analytic services; and automation capabilities that enable marketers to execute acquisition, growth, and retention strategies. He will be discussing how data segmentation has evolved and what state-of-the-art techniques are available now.

Stier's career spans 33 years with GM in various finance and sales positions, with the last 17 years devoted to dealer network development throughout the United States. Stier will be discussing how GM is using ESRI GIS to understand its data and how GIS creates actionable information used to improve GM's competitiveness and change its business paradigms.

The ESRI Business GeoInfo Summit will benefit anyone who is

-- Increasing productivity, competitiveness, or profitability

-- Making decisions about customers, markets, or distribution

-- Designing routes or managing fleets

-- Deploying enterprisewide GIS capabilities

-- Adding location finder tools to a corporate Internet site

-- Responsible for safety planning and emergency preparedness

-- Profiling households and target markets

-- Involved in real estate location and site development

-- Managing corporate real estate, facilities, or assets

The conference is designed for people who want to learn more about using GIS technology in business. Before the conference on Sunday afternoon, there will be concentrated workshops on technology, data, and management. The conference will officially begin with a welcome social on Sunday night; keynote presentations on Monday; and breakout sessions, user discussions, technical demonstrations, and more on Tuesday. More information about the 2006 ESRI Business GeoInfo Summit is available at www.esri.com/geoinfo. For questions about the summit, e-mail geoinfosummit@esri.com.

About ESRI

Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 5,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than 1 million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world's mapping and spatial analysis. ESRI is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit the company at www.esri.com.

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