At this year’s Developer and Technology Summit plenary, Jay Theodore and colleagues explored what it takes to design, build, and operate modern enterprise GIS systems. As organizations increasingly rely on geospatial technology to power mission-critical workflows, delivering scalable, reliable, and adaptable systems is a shared responsibility—between us at Esri, who build the platform, and you, the developers, system integrators, and IT administrators who implement and operate these systems.
At the center of this conversation is the idea of a well-architected ArcGIS system. Enterprise GIS goes beyond mapping and analytics—it is a full-stack platform that integrates enterprise data, supports diverse user workflows, enables automation, and evolves alongside emerging AI capabilities. By following proven architectural patterns and best practices, organizations can build robust systems that meet today’s operational needs while remaining flexible for future innovation.
During the plenary, a series of demonstrations illustrated how these principles come to life in real-world scenarios. Each demo highlighted different aspects of enterprise GIS, from integration with business systems to automation, extensibility, and the incorporation of AI-driven capabilities.
Each section in this blog includes a summary of the demo and a link to a companion blog that provides additional details and resources.
Business System Integration
Enterprise GIS rarely operates in isolation. Many organizations rely on integrations between ArcGIS and other enterprise platforms to support critical business workflows. The challenge, however, lies in keeping ArcGIS and those systems synchronized in real time without introducing additional complexity to existing apps and services. In his demo, Pankaj showed how service interceptors can help address this challenge.
Companion blog: Keeping enterprise systems in sync with service interceptors
Reliable, Observable, and Scalable Systems
As enterprise GIS deployments grow, ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance is key to building systems that can adapt, scale, and evolve with tomorrow’s business challenges. In his demo, Andrew walked through designing, load-testing, and monitoring a resilient ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes deployment, and offered a sneak peek of an exciting new capability, the Intelligent Sizing Advisor.
Companion blog: Building a Scalable and Observable System Using ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes
Scalable Raster Analytics
Spatial analysis often depends on processing large volumes of imagery and raster data, and as datasets grow in size and complexity, traditional analytic workflows can struggle to keep pace. In her demo, Mubarakat showcased how scalable raster analytics in ArcGIS Enterprise can unlock faster, more efficient insights from massive datasets, enabling organizations to act on spatial intelligence at the speed and scale today’s decisions demand.
Companion blog: Scalable raster analytics in ArcGIS Enterprise
Automation and Governance
In enterprise GIS systems, governance is essential to maintaining trust in the environment. All content must meet defined standards, system changes must be controlled, and user activity must be auditable. In his demo, Bill highlighted three governance strategies and how automation in ArcGIS Enterprise can help implement them consistently and at scale.
Companion blog: Automating Governance in ArcGIS Enterprise
Information to Knowledge with Agentic AI
Enterprise GIS systems rely on data from many sources, which means the challenge is not just mapping the information but seamlessly integrating it with ArcGIS and making it analysis-ready without disrupting existing systems of record. In his demo, Shreyas showcased three strategies for integrating disparate data with ArcGIS and layering AI agents and knowledge graphs on top to generate actionable insights.
Companion blog: From Information to Insight: Three Strategies for Integrating Data with ArcGIS
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