Esri UK appoints Mark Wells as Chief Technology Officer

Previously head of the company’s Technical Support and Managed Cloud Services divisions, Mark succeeds Charles Kennelly, who takes on the new role of Group CTO at Esri Holdings Ltd, which includes Esri UK, Esri Ireland and IT professional services company Helyx.

Responsible for directing the technical strategy and implementation of Esri UK technology, Mark will be focusing on developing new solutions to make GIS even more accessible and easier to use, through SaaS (software as a service) and the continuing development of AI and machine learning, to automate geospatial workflows and simplify how applications are built.

Moving to group level, Charles will be working across all companies within Esri Holdings on overall technical direction, working with Esri Inc in the U.S. on roadmap development and maximising shared efficiencies across the group.

Joining Esri UK almost 20 years ago, Mark has held numerous technical leadership roles including pre-sales, technical research and professional services. Instrumental in changing how GIS is delivered to customers, Mark was responsible for creating the company’s managed cloud services offering. Achieving 50% growth year-on-year during the last six years, managed cloud services has become the fastest growing part of the business.

“Esri UK’s biggest opportunity is to keep lowering the barriers to entry of GIS, in terms of cost and complexity and make it even more accessible,” explained Mark. "The company has made great progress in supporting large numbers of customers with their migration to online and mobile – we are seeing online GIS growing by around 30% a year. My focus will include delivering yet more Esri UK products via SaaS and developing automated workflows using AI and machine learning, to make sense of the huge amounts of real-time spatial data coming from IoT sensors and handheld devices.

Esri UK is also working on broadening the relevance of GIS to new user groups including Data Scientists and developing further enterprise capabilities for large-scale GIS with new approaches such as Kubernetes.”

“Esri UK is growing rapidly and to ensure this continues, we need to make senior appointments within the Esri Holdings companies who can focus on the operational development of each business and their technology direction,” commented Charles Kennelly. “We’re at the point with GIS where there is more opportunity than ever to help solve society’s problems. Mark’s technical expertise coupled with his business understanding makes him the perfect candidate to move from being my second-in-command to CTO and help shape the future of GIS in the UK.”

www.esriuk.com