Business Continuity Eases Software Acquisition

Redlands, California—February 4, 2009—Chesapeake Energy Corporation (CE) can now easily obtain geographic information system (GIS) software by using its ESRI enterprise license agreement (ELA). The ELA has simplified the petroleum company's efforts to expand its GIS by providing easier access to software and resources as well as a higher level of expertise.

Owning natural gas and oil wells across several regions, CE is the largest producer of natural gas in the United States . When the company implemented GIS in its land department, demand rose quickly, and in just three years, its user community grew from 6 people to 700, with applications in place across multiple departments. The GIS team found it frustrating to try to keep up with the rising GIS demand while buying software piece by piece. With the ELA in place, software pricing is more consistent, making it easier for the company to forecast a GIS budget. It also supports a faster means to obtain software and immediately meet its needs.

In just two years, the company's GIS staff grew from 5 analysts to nearly 50, with another dozen GIS IT support staff, all requiring high-level tools. Now three years out, GIS has become deeply embedded in the organization, and the actual user base continues to expand as employees adopt GIS to visualize company data. "When we took a hard look at our metrics of user growth, we realized the ELA was a good deal for us," explained Julie Parker, CE's director of GIS services.

As part of its agreement, CE has opted to include the ESRI Enterprise Advantage Program ( EEAP).

"We now have an assigned ESRI representative who understands our specific needs, keeps us informed about ESRI's development paths, and helps us to plan accordingly," Parker noted. "It's like ESRI has its finger on the pulse of our business. The ELA has opened the door for a much deeper and more robust collaboration."

The bulk of the system user base works in CE's geology, operations, and land departments. Employees have been thrilled to see their data in a spatial context and are queued up to work with the GIS team to develop new applications. An example of the CE GIS staff's innovation is an application that integrates with the corporate human resources database to create maps useful for managing teams assigned to various prospect areas. The ESRI ELA will also support CE's planned ArcGIS Server project, which will further ESRI software use within the company.

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.




Contact:

Barbara Shields
ESRI
Tel.: 909-793-2853, extension 1-2641
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