ESRI to Help Improve Homeland Security Operations

ESRI together with Microsoft Corp. are driving Homeland Security innovations to more effectively help protect citizens, prevent and solve crimes, and enable counter-terrorism through software. The newly formed collaboration will combine the best capabilities from both organizations in geospatial and collaborative technologies, and will result in advanced intelligence for state and local data fusion centers and emergency operations centers.

An intended product of this collaboration is the FusionX Appliance, a baseline IT architecture for fusion centers, which will provide users with advanced collaboration and geospatial intelligence capabilities by combining the power of ESRI’s ArcGIS Server Advanced Enterprise with the collaboration capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

FusionX will enable homeland security and law enforcement personnel to analyze previously disparate data sets in a mapping context and easily share that information in near real time with relevant stakeholders. FusionX will enhance the abilities of fusion center directors at the strategic and tactical level, enabling them to visualize patterns and trends to help prevent future acts of terrorism and crime, and facilitate a faster and more informed response when necessary. Through the intake of raw data such as fire, police and citizen reports, FusionX will allow for geocoding and mapping of the data to help detect man-made acts of terrorism and crime, such as organized, gang and drug-related activity. Critical GIS data is made accessible and shareable, replacing current collaborative analysis methods that rely on paper exchange and e-mail.

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