Finnish Universities Bundle Licences

With the implementation of a comprehensive three-year educational site license agreement with Esri, a Finnish university consortium has simplified its existing GIS software licensing agreements. Previously, the sixteen participating universities had signed a total of 49 separate licenses with Esri.

"The limited number of licenses under the previous agreement caused many bottlenecks," says Kimmo Koivunen, development manager at IT Center for Science (CSC), which administers the GIS licenses on behalf of the Ministry of Education and Culture. "This limitation [had] a severe impact on expanding the use of GIS on campus. With this new site license, we can now extend the use of the full suite of ArcGIS products across the entire consortium of universities."

Because of the many disciplines within geoscience that are taught at Finnish universities, Koivunen believes that the new licensing agreement will attract new users throughout the consortium. "GIS is commonly used in the geosciences, geography, and forestry," adds Koivunen. "This license gives our students the opportunity to learn a key technology in their chosen field."

Tuuli Toivonen, senior lecturer in geoinformatics at the University of Helsinki, is very happy with the new agreement and believes that it will have a significant impact on students learning GIS. "Previously, learning ArcGIS was limited to class time in crowded computer lab facilities," says Toivonen. "With the unlimited use provided by this license agreement, students can now work independently to learn how GIS is applied in geoinformatics."