A few words about Esri in closing.
We continue in our mission.
This is about serving you.
We've had now 50 years of experience doing it, and we like it.
I mean, all of us absolutely love you and love the opportunity to work with you.
Our work is about advancing GIS and the science that underpins it.
We believe strongly in high-quality engineering of our tools, this gets us excited, and also
integrating science and methods of thinking into the science.
We are very proud to say that we continue to be stable [inaudible 00:00:42] and growing.
And also, we're especially excited about working with you.
This conference, normally in San Diego, would have opened up thousands of opportunities
to talk about this and start new adventures, but now we're working from home.
And so I'd like to give you a little sense, while it's not San Diego, but a little sense
of our people and how they're working from home to serve you.
Could we roll this little video, please?
Ladies and gentlemen, these are the people that support you.
I really wish that we could be together in our normal way, but at least this is a way
to give you some sense of who we are and what we're working on in support of you.
A small team at Esri, actually it's a cross-cutting team, it's a virtual team, works to support
you in disaster response.
And this has been a team that's been operational for almost 30 years, supporting you in times
of fire, or hurricanes, or different kinds of emergencies.
And especially in the last few months, they've been working around the clock.
That little map in the lower left-hand corner shows over 5,000 hub implementations around
the world that stood up in response to the virus thing.
But any disasters that happen, it's part of our organization to support you and it's in
our DNA.
Esri has, in addition to our own company, a rich ecosystem of partners, thousands of
them, actually, that do data for you, that do services for you, that do consulting with
you, and some of these are quite large companies, big IT companies.
And there are literally hundreds of startup companies that we support with software to
get into this field and support you doing your work.
We also have a series of special relationships.
These are NGOs, again, around the world that are focused on conservation, humanitarian
response, and education.
And we are privileged, actually, to work closely with organizations like the National Audubon
Society, and the Half-Earth Project at Yale and Harvard, the World Food Program, and others.
And I'm particularly proud of the relationship that we have with the National Geographic
Society.
And by the way, they are offering you to become members of National Geographic Society.
All of our customers will get a few months of a free subscription.
I mean, I grew up on the National Geographic Society.
Seemed like a long time ago.
Getting that magazine meant a lot to me as a kid, and I'm still really connected.
In conservation, thousands of NGOs are supported by us in understanding and protecting nature.
And in education, something we likewise care a lot about.
We have programs for higher ed that are involving licensing to institutions, and departments,
and to students.
And by the way, we're making Learn ArcGIS lessons available to all students for a year.
In the K-12 program, I'm particularly excited because we have this program that goes to
every school on the planet, and there are thousands, and thousands, and thousands of
schools that use our curriculum and our platform to carry out work.
I'm pleased to announce a new program with National Geographic Society we're going to
hear more about on Wednesday.
This is an amazing organization that understands geographic education curriculum.
So we're coming together to offer new programs to help you not only in your kids' schools
but kids' schools around the planet.
Vicki Phillips, who's the vice president, is going to be coming in from D.C., well,
virtually, on Wednesday, and this is her little quotation.
She, like us, is so passionate about kids in schools.
She wants to use GIS to empower K-12 education everywhere.
And by the way, we're building the next generation.
We've got to build that kind of literacy into kids, helping kids everywhere, students everywhere,
children everywhere acquire geo-literacy skills, kind of like you have, and then develop the
skills that actually will let them be 21st-century workers that are going to change things.
Let me close by a couple of comments.
I've talked a lot about GIS and geographic science, and they are evolving rapidly, they're
becoming what I like to call geospatial infrastructure.
This is my dream, and I know it's a dream that many of you share.
It's already helping individuals and organizations.
It's helping whole communities do their work better.
And your individual work and your collective work, I see it every day, it's becoming a
powerful force for creating and applying this geographic knowledge everywhere.
But, or I might say nevertheless, we clearly need to do more.
Our global challenges are growing, and it's impacting our world, and it's impacting our
organizations, and it's impacting us, and it's impacting the very nature of our future.
This year, your work, responding to this COVID pandemic, is showing the power of GIS for
sure and creating global understanding.
But in addition to that, it's also showing us how collaborative action can be mobilized
everywhere.
It demonstrated that GIS professionals working in many kinds of organizations were able to
play critical roles in addressing this great challenge, but it also demonstrates it can
be mobilized to address all of the great challenges.
Ladies and gentlemen, I want to say to you and talk about your work, that your work,
I think, is becoming essential for realizing a sustainable future.
It's kind of the bottom line for me that, watching you do your work, watching the evolution
of the tools, the tools empowering your work, your work collaborating, seeing the great
need for responding to these big issues, my forecast is you're essential.
You'll be increasingly essential as the world continues to evolve.
Well, this is not San Diego, ladies and gentlemen.
I want to say thank you for coming, nevertheless, and also for your amazing work.
We are going to be stopping now, and breaking for a few minutes, and then going to work
in many different directions, into workshops.
We're going to open our Map Gallery, we're going to open exhibits for the exhibitors
who are here, and we'll be interacting in various new ways.
While we can't be spiritually together in the same room, at least I can say this, that
we're going to be together, and we're going to keep the spirit of supporting you and making
a difference in the world.
Thanks.
It's my great privilege to host this first virtual conference, and we'll look forward
to more collaboration in the future.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.