Redlands, California—May 23, 2011—With the implementation of a comprehensive three-year educational site license agreement with Esri, a Finnish university consortium has simplified its existing GIS software licensing agreements. Previously, the 16 participating universities had signed a total of 49 separate licenses with Esri.

"The limited number of licenses under the previous agreement caused many bottlenecks," says Kimmo Koivunen, development manager at IT Center for Science (CSC), which administers the GIS licenses on behalf of the Ministry of Education and Culture. "This limitation [had] a severe impact on expanding the use of GIS on campus. With this new site license, we can now extend the use of the full suite of ArcGIS products across the entire consortium of universities."

Because of the many disciplines within geoscience that are taught at Finnish universities, Koivunen believes that the new licensing agreement will attract new users throughout the consortium.

"GIS is commonly used in the geosciences, geography, and forestry," adds Koivunen. "This license gives our students the opportunity to learn a key technology in their chosen field."

Tuuli Toivonen, senior lecturer in geoinformatics at the University of Helsinki, is very happy with the new agreement and believes that it will have a significant impact on students learning GIS.

"Previously, learning ArcGIS was limited to class time in crowded computer lab facilities," says   Toivonen. "With the unlimited use provided by this license agreement, students can now work independently to learn how GIS is applied in geoinformatics."

For more information about Esri's higher education program, visit esri.com/university.

About Esri

Since 1969, Esri has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in geographic information system (GIS) technology, Esri software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. Esri applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world's mapping and spatial analysis. Esri is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at esri.com/news.



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