November 27, 2007

ESRI's New Director of Product Management to Expand Enterprise GIS Strategies

Redlands, California—Dirk Gorter, formerly of Symantec Corporation, has joined ESRI's senior corporate management team in the newly created position of director of product management. His charter is to implement new processes that will help ESRI create innovative geographic information system (GIS) software products that integrate into the wider business IT solution.

Gorter held several senior product management positions in different industry segments with leadership roles in application development and quality assurance tools and, most recently, in enterprise security and compliance management.

Comments Gorter, "GIS technology is increasingly being integrated into mainstream business operations within an enterprise-wide IT strategy. This new wave of users have requirements that can only be met by innovative software designs."

Says Jack Dangermond, ESRI president, "We are pleased that Dirk has joined our company and believe that he has much to offer with his extensive experience in product management in the commercial enterprise software industry. He will be helping us develop new markets as well as improving our products for the traditional user base."

Because of his wide experience in both medium and large software companies, Gorter's focus is on implementing a product management process that is similar to the agile product development process commonly used by software development teams. In this process, the initial steps used to achieve a result are analyzed, expanded, and reemployed for successive iterations.

Concludes Gorter, "I will be employing a similar process here at ESRI. By using agile product management methods, we can implement a process that is very effective in understanding market needs and defining product requirements. The results will be products with new capabilities that can help GIS departments transform to a more pivotal role within their organization and better meet the expanding needs of their client base."

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Press Information:
Jim Baumann, ESRI
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