Gorter held several senior product management positions in different industry segments with leadership roles in application development and quality assurance tools and, most recently, in enterprise security and compliance management.

Comments Gorter, "GIS technology is increasingly being integrated into mainstream business operations within an enterprise-wide IT strategy. This new wave of users have requirements that can only be met by innovative software designs."

Says Jack Dangermond, ESRI president, "We are pleased that Dirk has joined our company and believe that he has much to offer with his extensive experience in product management in the commercial enterprise software industry. He will be helping us develop new markets as well as improving our products for the traditional user base."

Because of his wide experience in both medium and large software companies, Gorter's focus is on implementing a product management process that is similar to the agile product development process commonly used by software development teams. In this process, the initial steps used to achieve a result are analyzed, expanded, and reemployed for successive iterations.

Concludes Gorter, "I will be employing a similar process here at ESRI. By using agile product management methods, we can implement a process that is very effective in understanding market needs and defining product requirements. The results will be products with new capabilities that can help GIS departments transform to a more pivotal role within their organization and better meet the expanding needs of their client base."

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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.