News & Events

Esri Community Analyst (CA) and Business Analyst (BA) are now available through UD-IT.  Portions of CA and BA are almost identical, but overall BA is a much more robust offering.  Though CA is targeted to general use and BA for business use, portions of BA can be leveraged for non-business uses.  I gave a talk on GIS Tools and Resources for Location-based questions in Business, focusing on BA, to the Lerner College of Business & Economics in February as part of their college seminar series, and got the chance to spend some time exploring it; more recently I’ve been checking out CA, as well.  In this article, I briefly describe CA and BA components, functionality, and data.

The principal manifestation of CA is Community Analyst Online (CAO).  CAO provides access to the CA data principally through reporting tools, which can be quickly used for initial investigations, site selection and comparison using extensive demographic (current and 5-year projections) and some business data.  All 8755 variables are available to us through CA, with our “Standard Plus” subscription.  The CA APIs, for Flex, REST, and Silverlight provide the ability to interact programmatically with essentially the same capabilities as CAO, but with the additional capability to get XML-formatted publicly available CA datasets. Finally, CA can also be used through a desktop add-in (reporting toolbar), which provides reporting through ArcGIS Desktop and the ability to aggregate reports to custom boundary files.

Business Analyst Online provides essentially the same capabilities as CAO.  However, the data set, with over 11,000 variables, covers more ground, including: additional consumer spending, business locations, market potential, crime, banking, major shopping centers, traffic counts, and lifestyle segmentation data.  Like the CA API, the BA API provides hooks to interact with the BAO capabilities programmatically.  The similarities between CA and BA end there.  BA Desktop offers a robust set of tools that can be used for more sophisticated analysis – such as Huff Gravity modeling.  BA Desktop analysis can provide even more valuable insights when integrated with in-house data.  The bundled data itself is unencumbered and relatively “raw”, so it can be used in any kind of analysis, even outside of GIS.  Finally, BA Server makes it possible to integrate BA dynamic analysis enterprise IT workflows and systems.

To use CAO and BAO, you should first register your Esri Global Account with our BAO subscription.  If you don’t already have a Esri global account, create one.  Next, register your global account with the BAO subscription at using our custom link (please contact gis-info@udel.edu for that).  Note our BAO subscription has a maximum of 2500 users; distribute this URL with discretion (no non-UD use).   Once you’ve registered your account, you can login to CAO or BAO with your Esri global account.

If you already have ArcGIS Desktop installed, you can install the BA Desktop software and data by downloading it from our GIS software page (UD CAS login required), doubling-clicking to extract, and then running Esri.exe from inside the extracted folder.  The CA desktop add-in can also be downloaded from the Esri site, but you must first register for an Esri global account.
To learn more, you view the virtual campus courses on CA or view demonstration videos on BA.