Gentry Systems to Migrate Existing Application Suite to ArcInfo 8

Business Relationship To Benefit Electric Cooperatives, Municipal Utility Markets

Redlands, California—ESRI and Gentry Systems today announced the formation of a business relationship to benefit electric cooperative and municipal utility markets.

The relationship will result in the migration of the Gentry Systems application suite to the ArcInfo 8 technology platform. Working prototypes are anticipated by the ESRI User Conference in June with initial product release to take place in third quarter 2000.

Gentry Systems is a leading provider of application software to electric cooperative customers with over 300 electric utility customers. Gentry Systems supplies GenMap, an automated mapping/facilities management system that extends geographic information system (GIS) technology for electric utilities; GenStake, an automated staking sheet and job estimating software package; GenTCA, a trouble call analysis and outage management system; and UDS, an electric work order and engineering and design automation package.

"We see this as an excellent opportunity to bring the leading GIS tools into our application software, giving customers a robust solution for meeting their information needs," says Hal Gentry, president, Gentry Systems. "We want to be able to have our applications work seamlessly with relational database software, such as Oracle or SQL Server, and we want to leverage the Component Object Model (COM) industry-standard architecture, giving our customers a leading technology solution. Migrating our software to the ArcInfo 8 platform will allow us to do this."

"Gentry Systems is a leader in providing application software to the electric co-op market, and they have established themselves as a company driven to provide customers with the best software and service possible," says Mitchell Garnett, electric and gas industry solutions manager, ESRI. "Utilities depend more now than ever before on the ability to understand assets and customers using technology. By working with Gentry Systems to integrate our respective technologies, we believe customers will be able to do this in an optimum fashion."

The end result of the largest research and development effort in the history of the GIS industry, ArcInfo 8 sets the new standard for applying geographic knowledge and supporting spatial decision making. From project GIS to a large spatial enterprise, ArcInfo 8 is the scalable solution that provides organizations with a complete, integrated platform for creating, managing, and disseminating geographic information.

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