Wayland, MA, June 1, 2001. Open GIS Consortium, Inc. announced today that IBM is a Principal Member of the Open GIS Consortium (OGC). As a Principal Member, IBM will participate in OGC's Planning and Technical Committees. In the area of geospatial technology as in other disciplines and technologies, IBM recognizes, promotes, and supports industry standards in order to better serve its customers with solutions that improve productivity and reduce costs.”As a leader in driving industry standards adoption, IBM is pleased to be helping the OGC build a standards platform for communication of spatial information,” said Jim Kelly, vice president of marketing, IBM Data Management Solutions. “This innovative technology will help customers rapidly build and deploy e-business solutions requiring spatial information.”For over 30 years, IBM has provided GIS (Geographical Information Systems) offerings focused on particular industries. As a major business systems provider, IBM works to help customers in all industries achieve efficient and effective management and integration of geospatial data with business data. In response to customer demand, IBM and ESRI, a major GIS tools vendor, jointly developed the DB2 Spatial Extender, enabling DB2 Universal Database customers to perform powerful spatial analysis. IBM's GIS solutions include not only services, but also integration with other IBM business intelligence technologies such as data mining and data warehousing, pervasive computing, and a variety of business partner tools.OGC is an international industry consortium of over 200 companies, government agencies and universities working together to develop geoprocessing standards. OGC's OpenGIS Specifications establish common geoprocessing interfaces and protocols that are “geo-enabling” the Web, enabling developers to make complex geographic and non-graphic spatial information accessible and useful to people who are not GIS experts.By working closely with OGC, IBM can provide critical input and participate in the process of developing these innovative technologies. IBM will then help customers build and deliver their own geospatial offerings, offerings that help make “time and space” part of their own information economy.– end –“