REDLANDS, Calif., 10 June 2007. A team of Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEN) and ESRI engineers won a contract to work on NATO's Core Geographic Services program, a project that will reportedly shape the application of geospatial technology in defense for years to come.

The services, technology, and software the contract provides will ensure that all NATO staff, from the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) to NATO's deployable headquarters (HQ), will have the best available geospatial information at all times.

Commanders, analysts, and other NATO network users will fuse geospatial content from Core Geographic Services with other forms of information for command and control, intelligence, and logistics applications. The Core Geographic Services form a key architectural building block in support of NATO's service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Under Siemens SEN integration and management, this project brings together ESRI's geographic information system (GIS) software with the latest database technology and hardware.

At the heart of the system is ESRI's ArcGIS Server, which provides services to NATO staff through a Web viewer and to other NATO systems through standard Open Geospatial Consortium Inc. (OGC) interfaces.

NATO's GIS staff will use ESRI's ArcGIS Desktop to conduct complex GIS analysis and data integration. ESRI's Job Tracking for ArcGIS (JTX) extension manages and tracks all these GIS workflows and tasks.