GIS Software and Major Platforms

The commercial center of gravity in GIS software has long been Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute), founded in Redlands, California, in 1969 by Jack Dangermond and Laura Dangermond as a land-use consulting firm before it pivoted toward software. Esri released ArcInfo in 1982, one of the first commercially successful vector-based GIS packages, followed by the desktop-oriented ArcView GIS in 1992 and the unified ArcGIS Desktop suite in 1999, which bundled ArcMap, ArcCatalog, and related tools into a single license. Esri retired ArcMap in favor of ArcGIS Pro, first released in 2015, and complemented its desktop line with ArcGIS Online, a cloud-based platform for web mapping, hosted data, and collaborative dashboards — a shift mirroring the broader industry move from desktop-only software toward browser-accessible, server-hosted GIS.