The value of partner integration: Esri, HERE Technologies, and Amazon Location Service

At re:Invent 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the release of Amazon Location Service in preview. The fully managed service helps developers add location data to their applications while maintaining data security and user privacy. Amazon Location Service integrates data sources and services from AWS Partners Esri and HERE.

Amazon Location Service can help build a wide range of location-enabled applications, for uses such as asset tracking, geo-marketing, and delivery management. The service is now in preview in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

The value of AWS Partner integration

Our partner community is very important to our customers. I just completed my virtual tour of 100 partners in 100 days, where I developed an even stronger sense of our partners’ purposes and businesses, and what will help differentiate and deepen their specializations. Having more trusted global providers contributing data to location services was a top priority.

After listening to the partner requests, we leveraged our long-standing relationships with leading global providers of location-based data and services—and our AWS Partners—Esri and HERE, to create Amazon Location Service. AWS built Amazon Location Service to help users access high-quality global data from these longtime, trusted, geospatial location data providers.

Amazon Location Service uses Esri’s location services to provide maps, geocoding and search to AWS customers. Esri’s location services are built with high-quality, authoritative, and ready-to-use location data, curated by expert teams of cartographers, geographers, and demographers.

We integrated HERE Location Services for map rendering, geocoding, and search. In the future, we will add additional location capabilities from our partners including routing. HERE is known globally for its accurate, secure, and enterprise-grade location data. They have over 196 mapped countries and their location services power enterprise applications across industries.

HERE location data provides users with a high level of flexibility and functionality with more than 900+ attributes within the map that give access to location context including administrative and postal code boundary shapes, point addressing, postal codes, and more. In the words of HERE chief product officer, Jørgen Behrens, “We live in a world that is increasingly powered by location data and technology, enabling people and objects to move and interact faster, safer, and in more efficient ways than ever before.”

Esri helps Amazon Location Service deliver geocoding through the cloud at a high level of scalability to support increased workloads and customer demands. The distributed cloud infrastructure of AWS also provides a highly available geocoding service with reliable access available anywhere, anytime, and on any device.

By making these services available through AWS, customers experience low network latency and therefore extremely fast response time that can meet your business requirements. As Dirk Gorter, director of product management and product marketing at Esri said, “We are excited to grow our partnership with AWS by bringing best-in-class services to customers on Amazon Location Service. This will enable businesses around the globe to achieve high levels of scalability while delivering reliable and industry leading quality location services. Together with AWS, Esri’s location services help organizations unlock the power of location intelligence in applications and everyday workflows.”

Action for our Partners

If you are building a solution that requires knowing where your products, assets, or personnel are actually being used in your mission or business, consider an integration with Amazon Location Service. The solution gives your developers a consistent API, on-demand consumption and pricing, simple location tools, software development kits (SDKs), and solution guides to help them get started. Amazon Location Service integrates with Amazon EventBridge and Amazon CloudWatch, so it can be a seamless part of your automated event-driven application architecture on AWS. This means you can trigger alerts, actions, and logging whenever your trucks, sensors enter or exit a defined (geofenced) area. Combined with AWS IoT, edge computing, machine learning, analytics, serverless and storage capabilities, the solution development possibilities are virtually endless. Check out a sample reference architecture on tracking high-value equipment with geofencing from Amazon Location Service and AWS IoT.

Amazon Location Service can help you use location data simply, without sacrificing on data security, user privacy, or paying the high costs of other major map providers.

If you are an AWS Partner with a solution that requires location data or is further differentiated with a geospatial solution, contact us.