Retail Organizations Can Make Better Business Decisions Using Rich Data and Analysis Tools

Redlands, California — January 27, 2014—Esri announces that Signal Data Corporation has incorporated Esri Location Analytics into its business intelligence platform, Signal Retail. Signal Data is a venture-backed financial technology company located in New York, New York, that helps investors and retailers analyze the quality of retailers' and restaurants' store locations and track competitive activity. With Esri Location Analytics incorporated into Signal Data, organizations that focus on the retail industry, including institutional investors, lenders, retailers, and commercial real estate owners, now have the ability to make better investment decisions.

"We implemented the Esri platform to help us solve the pain points our institutional investor and retailer clients face," said Steve Blose, cofounder and chief executive officer of Signal Data. "Now, we can give our customers competition-adjusted location analysis—that missing component in their workflow. Our software enables clients to uncover the root causes of store locations' profitability by analyzing the locations based on competition, economic activity, and demographics."

Signal Retail offers clients an integrated competitive intelligence and site selection software platform that combines Signal Data's proprietary location data and competitive analytics with Esri's location analytics tools. The Signal Retail platform includes rich business data and analytical tools that allow investors to graph, map, and analyze retail and restaurant store-based performance and keep track of the competition by knowing where every single retail outlet is located.

Signal Retail comes preloaded with retailers' locations, new and closed stores identified, stores categorized by retail sector, and retailers benchmarked versus peers. Previously, retailers and investors would have to track this data on an ad hoc basis, which was extremely difficult and costly, if not impossible.

Now users can log on to the cloud-based system and view data about each location. They are able to see, for example, if stores that opened recently—as opposed to five years ago—are the same quality investment by analyzing competitive relationships and view Signal's proprietary, competition-adjusted demographic, economic, and spending metrics based on local markets.

"Understanding customer behavior inside stores is now as important as the external characteristics and demographics," said Simon Thompson, director of commercial industry, Esri. "Information is power. Signal Data has filled a gaping hole in the industry, and with this information, clients can create healthier investments, which leads to healthier businesses and communities."

For more information on how Esri helps businesses operate better, visit esri.com/business.

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About Signal Data
Signal Data Corporation provides a proprietary retail analytics software platform for investors, lenders, retailers, and real estate owners. The platform offers original analytics, operational data, and mapping analysis and is the only product in market that analyzes the quality of US based retailers' locations on a comprehensive and updated basis. Signal's client list includes some of the most respected mutual funds, hedge funds, pension plans, and retailers in the US. For more information on Signal Data, visit www.signaldataco.com

About Esri
Since 1969, Esri has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, 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 www.esri.com.

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