Esri today rolled out an ambitious cloud offering for government and enterprise customers that allows users to create data-driven maps and map services without ArcGIS servers or desktop software.

ArcGIS Online organizational subscriptions, in beta since December, also provide:

• Tools for application development using geospatial data
• An open API for integration with software such as Microsoft Office, Salesforce and Cognos
• Mapping of data within Excel as long as that data has a street address or city name (geocoding will be automatic)
• Cataloguing of GIS assets, making such data easier to find (and less likely to be duplicated by others in an organization who don’t know it’s there)
• Private sharing among internal groups
• Maps that display across numerous mobile devices as well as in Web browsers
• And hosting on either public or private cloud infrastructure.

“One way to describe it — and here’s a big sentence — is that ArcGIS Online is a mapping platform, a new geospatial enterprise platform but especially focusing in on mapping,” said Esri founder and President Jack Dangermond in a phone interview with Computerworld (see related story). “It has other services in there, like geocoding services across the enterprise or spatial analysis services that can be deployed across the enterprise, but the basic thing that most people recognize it for is that it has really cool maps.

Esri Rolls Out ArcGIS Map Services For The Cloud