#ESRIUC Plenary Award Winners
CenterPoint Energy’s Cindi Salas, director, Land & Field Services took the Enterprise Application Award. The utility serves 1.2 million electric and 3.2 million gas customers. It’s big accomplishment with GIS (and other tools I’m sure): getting power up and running after hurricane Ike in just days. Of note in the video from the company: all of the desktop GIS users had two monitors.
Dr. K. Kasturirangan, Member (Science), Planning Commission, Government of India, received the Making a Difference Award for his work on India’s space program. He’ll be making more of a difference in a new role, leading planning for the country. He didn’t speak to his own accomplishments, but rather described Jack Dangermond as providing “extraordinary leadership,” as a “missionary,” and an “impeccable professional.” ESRI works harder than most companies to highlight its users work. It was perhaps appropriate that this fellow pushed his success back to ESRI in general and toward Dangermond in particular.
Martin O’Malley, as I noted earlier this week, received the President’s Award. The state was about ESRI customer #8 and the governor described GIS as perhaps, “the lynchpin of a powerful new movement.” In a talk/demo he highlighted the importance of GIS for “strengthening connections” and “sharing rather than hoarding” data. It was interesting to see a governor giving a GIS (Web) demo, but I honestly felt bad for what must be a very strong GIS staff, who save the head of StateStat, were not mentioned.
