At the same time, ESRI has continued to develop major software releases for multiple products that rely on widely accepted computing industry standards. The GIS need for interoperability comes from the evolution of organizations sharing and utilizing the increasingly important spatial data that drives business and government information analysis. All parts of an organization must share those data and analysis applications. Further, organizations demand access to other organizations' data and analysis applications that are common to their purpose. Within this architecture applications are either clients or servers.
Clients request data or processing services of servers and present server results to end users.
Clients and servers can communicate over local area, wide area, and Internet networks. ESRI software development shifts the focus of spatial data handling from geodata processing to geoprocessing interoperability.