Jack Dangermond launched Environmental Systems Research Institute in 1969 as a nonprofit, land-use consulting firm. It evolved into the world's largest geodatabase and mapping software provider. "[Back then] I was playing around with digital representations of geographic data," he says. "My passion was environmental planning and the ability to abstract geographic data into the computer. That allowed me to develop models for watersheds, models for traffic, models for urban planning, and environmental models." Today, the firm known as Esri has a 43 % share of the GIS software market worldwide, informing decision-making for federal agencies, major landowners, cities and departments of everything from planning to transportation. While his company generates billions of dollars by supporting building decisions, Dangermond always wanted the data that GIS developers create to inform more decisions, particularly ones by construction users of BIM software. After abandoning its own attempt to get into mapping, Autodesk approached Dangermond in 2017 to partner on doing just that. Now, new workflows are putting Esri data into the hands of construction professionals.
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