Esri UC 2026: Here's Telecom Focused Companies You Don't Want to Miss

There's a reason so many of us in the telecom and GIS world circle Esri's User Conference on our calendars every year, and this one feels especially significant. Esri's User Conference is heading back to San Diego, July 13 through 17, 2026, and the Utilities, Telecom, and Water pavilion is going to be one of the busiest, most energizing corners of the entire show floor.

Broadband expansion is moving faster than it has in decades, funding programs are pushing operators to build into places that were considered too remote or too costly just a few years ago, and the pressure to get networks planned, permitted, and built on time has never been higher. That kind of momentum creates real excitement, but it also creates real need, because you can't plan a fiber build, manage a wireless deployment, or track a broadband grant with a stack of spreadsheets and outdated maps anymore.

That's exactly where the companies on this list come in, and honestly, that's why I find this part of the show so worth paying attention to. The telecom industry is being asked to do more with better data, faster timelines, and tighter budgets, and the vendors exhibiting this year have built their entire businesses around solving one piece of that puzzle or another. Some of them bring fresh, frequently updated imagery so you can see the ground truth of your service area without sending a crew out. Others bring parcel and property data so rich that site selection and permitting become a lot less guesswork and a lot more precision.

You'll find cloud partners who can take the weight of managing servers off your team's plate, engineering firms who bring real boots-on-the-ground expertise to your data, and AI-driven tools that are starting to turn things like building permits and weather patterns into genuine predictive intelligence. Taken together, these companies cover the full lifecycle of a telecom network, from the earliest planning stages all the way through construction and ongoing operations, and that's a powerful thing to have organized in one place on a single show floor.

Esri's own telecom team recently put together a partner map for this year's show and published it on their community feed, and it's a genuinely great resource if you haven't seen it yet. It's what got me thinking about this piece in the first place, and I wanted to build on it with my own take on which telecom-focused partners deserve real time on your schedule, starting with the Waypoint 33 companies I work with directly and rounding out with the rest of the floor worth knowing about.

Map courtesy of the Esri telecom team: Available Here

Using this I put some thoughts together around a list of the telecom-focused Esri partners and telecom focused companies you don't want to miss. First up are the Waypoint 33 partner companies, since I think you deserve to know upfront where my own business relationships sit at this time. After that, you'll find every other company worth your attention as I love working with them all. I organized alphabetically, because a strong show floor is bigger than any one set of partnerships and the right fit depends entirely on what your organization actually needs.

Also, if you're not making it to San Diego this year, let's talk anyway. I'd love to connect you with some of the great people on this list regardless of whether you're walking the show floor yourself.

First Stop! Don't Skip Esri's Own Telecom Team

Before you start working your way down this list, make a point of finding Esri's own telecom team,

since they're stationed right in the Utilities, Telecom, and Water pavilion alongside every partner booth I'm about to walk you through. They can talk you through what's new with the ArcGIS Utility Network Telecom Domain Network coming this summer, help you think through where your own GIS environment might be falling short, and point you toward whichever partner in this list actually fits what you're working on. That conversation is worth having before you dive into the partner booths, not after, since it gives you a clearer sense of what to ask each vendor once you get there.

Waypoint 33 Partners

Currently, Waypoint 33 works with each of the three companies below so I want to be upfront about that before you read another word. We don't partner with everybody who asks, so these are relationships built because the products genuinely hold up, the teams behind them know the telecom space, and we've seen firsthand how they help operators solve real problems. That said, a partnership doesn't mean a company is the right fit for every network or every budget, so I'd still encourage you to read these entries with the same critical eye you'd bring to anyone else on the floor.

Booth 213

This is the one where I have the deepest tie, since Waypoint 33 serves as the exclusive U.S. distributor for Cellular Expert. This ArcGIS-native RF planning platform has been the tool of choice for wireless engineers since 2000, handling coverage modeling, radio link planning, and network optimization down to a resolution of 1 to 10 meters. If you're doing anything with wireless propagation, spectrum planning, or defense and telecom network design, this is a genuine can't-miss stop, and I'd say that even if I didn't work with them.

Booth 1219

VertiGIS is one of the more established names in enterprise GIS software, building configurable workflow and web mapping tools that extend what ArcGIS can do out of the box. Their products show up across a wide range of industries, and their long history as an Esri partner means a mature, well-tested product line. Alongside their Spatial booth mentioned above, this is a good stop for anyone looking to extend ArcGIS with enterprise-grade workflow tools.

Booth 913

Baron Weather delivers weather intelligence that plugs directly into ArcGIS, from radar and lightning data to hail size estimates and extreme weather indexes. For telecom and utility operators, that means real-time visibility into which parts of your network are about to take a hit from a storm, so crews can get ahead of outages instead of just reacting to them. Their data is hosted on AWS with a strong uptime record and round-the-clock meteorologist support, which matters when severe weather doesn't wait for business hours.

Make Sure to Also Visit These Fantastic Teams

The rest of the floor is packed with strong options too, and plenty of them might be a better match for your organization than anything in the partner section above. Not every tool is built for every network, and the right choice usually comes down to your specific infrastructure, budget, and what you're trying to accomplish this year. Here's the full rundown, in alphabetical order, so you can judge each one on its own merits.

1Spatial by VertiGIS, Booth 412

Spatial is a VertiGIS product focused on giving organizations powerful, configurable tools for enterprise GIS workflows, and it sits alongside VertiGIS's broader family of Esri-based solutions. If your team already knows VertiGIS from Geocortex or Studio, this booth is worth a visit to see how their product lineup has continued to evolve. It's a good complement to the main VertiGIS booth elsewhere on the floor.

AWS, Booth 2313

Amazon Web Services needs no introduction, but it's worth remembering how much telecom GIS work now happens in the cloud. AWS hosts a huge share of the ArcGIS Enterprise environments running today, and their team at the show can talk through everything from cost optimization to disaster recovery for your GIS stack. If your organization is weighing a move off on-premise servers, this is a good place to start that conversation.

Cotality, Booth 2226

Cotality is the new name for CoreLogic, and it's still the same deep well of property information, analytics, and risk data that the real estate, insurance, and lending industries have relied on for years. For telecom planners, Cotality's parcel and property datasets are a strong input for site selection, market analysis, and risk assessment work. It's a good example of how property data companies are becoming just as important to network planning as traditional GIS vendors.

CyberTech Systems and Software, Booth 719

CyberTech is one of the more comprehensive Esri partners at the show, covering everything from ArcGIS cloud modernization and managed services to Utility Network implementation and geospatial AI. They were the first Esri partner to earn the ArcGIS Cloud Services Specialty, and they manage more than 100 cloud environments across government, utilities, and telecom clients. If your organization needs help with anything from a cloud migration to standing up Utility Network for the first time, this team covers a lot of ground under one roof.

Cyclomedia, Booth 105

Cyclomedia specializes in high-resolution, street-level imagery captured systematically across entire regions, giving GIS teams a way to see the real-world condition of assets without sending a crew out to look. For telecom and utility planners, that kind of imagery is a huge time-saver when you need to verify pole conditions, right-of-way clearances, or aerial infrastructure without a truck roll. Worth a look if your organization is still relying on outdated field photos or manual site visits.

Dataminr, Booth 1825

Dataminr uses AI to scan public data in real time, including social media, news, and other open sources, to flag emerging events like severe weather, civil unrest, or infrastructure incidents before they hit traditional news channels. For network operations teams, that early warning can mean the difference between proactively rerouting traffic or dispatching a crew and finding out about a problem after it's already caused an outage. It's a solid complement to more traditional GIS-based monitoring tools.

DIG-SMART, Booth 625

Dig-Smart has been solving one-call ticket management for underground utility operators since 2004, and their software is deeply woven into the ArcGIS platform, from desktop analysis tools to a mobile locator app used by crews in the field. If you're managing 811 damage prevention tickets and dealing with underground fiber, gas, or electric assets, this is purpose-built software rather than a generic GIS bolt-on. Their long partnership with Esri, going back nearly two decades, shows in how well their tools fit into existing utility workflows.

dymaptic, Booth 436

Dymaptic is a woman-owned, Esri Gold Partner that builds custom GIS software and increasingly AI-powered tools for ArcGIS, including their GeoBlazor library for .NET developers and an Accessible Map Agent that generates ADA and WCAG-compliant descriptions of web maps. They've done multi-year work for clients like the City of Houston's Public Works department, so they know how to take a GIS environment from a single project to an ongoing, evolving system. If your team is exploring GeoAI or needs custom development beyond what off-the-shelf tools offer, this is a team worth talking to.

EagleView, Booth 2019

EagleView is a longtime name in aerial imagery, capturing high-resolution oblique and orthogonal imagery that feeds property analytics across dozens of use cases. For telecom, that kind of imagery supports everything from pole attachment surveys to identifying rooftop equipment locations without a site visit. It's a well-established player, and worth comparing against some of the newer imagery providers at the show to see which fits your workflow and budget best.

Earth Daily, Booth 128

Earth Daily Analytics is building a constellation designed to image nearly the entire planet every single day, turning satellite data into AI-ready analytics for governments and enterprises. That kind of daily revisit rate is a different proposition than traditional satellite imagery, which might only capture a given area every few weeks. For telecom planners tracking large-scale infrastructure changes, urban growth, or environmental risk over time, this daily cadence opens up analysis that just wasn't practical before.

ENTRUST Solutions Group, Booth 109

ENTRUST, now part of Leidos, is one of the fastest-growing engineering and data solutions firms serving gas, electric, and telecommunications clients, and they've been an Esri Gold Partner for over a decade. Their tools handle everything from pipeline risk analysis to alignment sheet generation, and their Data Solutions team specifically supports communications and fiber optic project design and deployment. If you need engineering muscle behind your GIS data, not just software, ENTRUST brings serious depth to the table.

First American Data & Analytics, Booth 319

First American Data & Analytics has been compiling property and land records data since 1889, and as the data division of First American Financial, they bring one of the largest property datasets in the country to the table. Their parcel and property data recently landed on ArcGIS Living Atlas, with over 95% of tax roll records matched to parcel geometry. For anyone doing site selection, permitting, or right-of-way work, that kind of property data depth is hard to beat.

LightBox, Booth 101

LightBox is a location intelligence platform that unifies data from over 50,000 sources into a single, standardized nationwide dataset covering parcels, zoning, addresses, and building footprints. Their SmartFabric product connects over 158 million parcels and 263 million addresses, all tied together with a proprietary identifier that makes it easy to build rich, connected analysis. For telecom planners, that kind of connected property data is genuinely useful for broadband coverage analysis and network planning work.

Mach9, Booth 2314

Mach9's work in telecom is worth knowing about, so I'm including them on your journey! Their Digital Surveyor platform uses AI to automatically extract features like utility poles and paint lines from mobile mapping LiDAR data, then exports the results straight into ArcGIS as design-grade GIS deliverables. For telecom teams, that's already sped up rural broadband design and permitting, along with make-ready fiber assessments. Worth tracking down if your team is still hand-digitizing pole and asset data from LiDAR scans.

Nearmap, Booth 2219

Nearmap captures high-resolution aerial imagery on a frequent, repeatable schedule, including vertical, oblique, panorama, and 3D formats, paired with AI-powered location intelligence. That frequent capture cadence is the real differentiator here: instead of imagery that's a year or two old, you're working with a much more current picture of the ground. For telecom teams tracking new construction, right-of-way changes, or competitor build-out, that currency matters a lot.

OOKLA, Booth 1912

Ookla is the company behind Speedtest, and their network performance data is one of the authoritative sources Esri points to for broadband mapping and digital divide analysis. If you're working on a BEAD application, grant reporting, or any project that requires demonstrating actual network performance rather than just advertised speeds, Ookla's crowdsourced data is a resource you'll want in your toolkit. It's a good complement to FCC and Census data when building out a complete picture of coverage gaps.

Pandell, Booth 200

Pandell has been an Esri Gold Partner for over 20 years, building land and GIS software that helps telecom, utility, pipeline, and energy companies manage leases, easements, permits, and rights-of-way in one system. Their LandWorks platform integrates directly with Pandell GIS, so when an attribute changes in the land management system, the map updates automatically. If you're still tracking right-of-way obligations in spreadsheets and separate GIS layers, this is exactly the kind of integration that saves a lot of manual reconciliation work.

RAMTeCH, Booth 612

RAMTeCH has been a dedicated Esri geospatial partner since 1992, and they were recently recognized as an Esri Cornerstone Partner for 20 years of continuous commitment to the platform. Their work spans Utility Network implementation, data quality analytics, and engineering services specifically built for utility, telecommunications, and oil and gas clients. If your organization is planning a migration to the Esri Utility Network model, their uNAP program is designed to help you scope and justify exactly that kind of transition.

Regrid, Booth 727

Regrid is Esri's official commercial partner for parcel data, delivering standardized land parcel boundaries and property attributes across the U.S. and Canada, with a growing footprint in Europe as well. Their Premium Parcel Data now includes demographic, environmental, and elevation enrichments built with Esri, which is a meaningful upgrade for anyone doing site analysis. Given how central parcel data is to broadband planning and infrastructure siting, this is one of the more foundational booths at the show.

ReportAll, Booth 824

ReportAll maintains a nationwide parcel database covering more than 165 million parcels across over 3,200 U.S. counties, standardizing data that varies wildly in format from one county to the next. Their Feature Service integrates directly into ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Online, with parcel data updated daily and links back to the original county GIS source. If county-by-county parcel data inconsistency has ever slowed down a project, this is a solid fix worth checking out.

RINA, Booth 1215

RINA has been an Esri Gold Business Partner for more than 30 years, and their North America geospatial team covers a lot of ground, from GIS strategy and platform advising to Utility Network implementation and full application development. Their team holds credentials like GISP and Esri Utility Network professional certification, so this isn't a firm dabbling in GIS on the side. For telecom specifically, their Qualify with Confidence tool is worth asking about, since it uses ArcGIS to help operators estimate build costs and serviceability quickly instead of piecing that analysis together by hand. If your organization needs strategic GIS consulting alongside hands-on implementation help, this is a strong stop.

ROK Technologies, Booth 1625

ROK Technologies takes your GIS to the cloud, and they've been doing it since 2008, well before cloud-hosted ArcGIS Enterprise was the norm. They're a recognized Esri Cloud Specialty Partner and were the first partner to earn several advanced Esri cloud designations, including the ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes Specialty. If your organization is trying to figure out whether it's time to move off on-premise ArcGIS or optimize an existing cloud environment, this team has been solving exactly that problem for a long time.

SBS (Spatial Business Systems), Booth 1013

SBS builds intelligent design software that blends the worlds of Esri Utility Network and AutoCAD, and their Automated Utility Design platform is widely used for electric, gas, and telecom network design. Their Fiber ConnectionHub product specifically handles fiber connection and diagramming for organizations managing communications networks. If your engineering team is stuck manually reconciling CAD drawings with GIS data, this is one of the more mature tools out there for closing that gap.

Shovels, Booth S2

Shovels uses AI to turn building permits, one of the most fragmented and overlooked data sources out there, into clean, GIS-ready feature layers inside ArcGIS. For telecom operators, permit data is a genuinely powerful leading indicator: you can spot a new subdivision the moment its master permit is approved and start planning fiber-to-the-home rollout before a single house is built. Their data is also available through the Esri Living Atlas, which makes it about as easy as possible to start experimenting with in your own maps.

TEKsystems Global Services, Booth 2012

TEKsystems is one of the largest IT staffing and consulting firms in the country, and their Global Services arm brings that scale to GIS and telecom projects that need extra hands, whether that's short-term project support or longer-term staff augmentation. For organizations juggling a big broadband build or a GIS modernization project without enough internal bandwidth, this is a resource worth knowing about even if it's not a software booth in the traditional sense. Sometimes the missing piece isn't a new tool, it's more people who already know how to use the ones you have.

Vexcel, Booth 2026

Vexcel Data Program is one of the major sources of high-resolution aerial imagery in the Esri ecosystem, covering more than 25 countries with oblique, true ortho, digital surface model, and multispectral data. Their imagery feeds directly into ArcGIS Living Atlas, so it's already integrated into workflows a lot of GIS teams are using every day. Worth comparing against nearmap and EagleView if you're shopping for aerial imagery providers at the show, since each has a slightly different capture approach and coverage footprint.

Bringing It All Together

Looking at this list all at once, what stands out to me is just how complete the picture has become.

A few years ago, a telecom operator might have needed to piece together imagery from one vendor, parcel data from another, cloud hosting from a third, and network design software from a fourth, with none of it talking to each other cleanly. Now, thanks to how deeply these companies have built into the Esri ecosystem, that same operator can pull frequently updated aerial imagery, rich property and parcel data, real-time weather and permit intelligence, and purpose-built fiber and wireless design tools into one connected GIS environment. That kind of integration used to be the exception, and now it's quickly becoming the expectation, which says a lot about how far this industry has come and how much further it's positioned to go.

The bigger story here is that the telecom industry is at a genuine inflection point, with broadband funding, 5G buildouts, and aging infrastructure all demanding smarter, faster, and more collaborative ways of working. The companies on this list aren't just selling software or data; they're giving planners, engineers, and field teams the tools to make better decisions with confidence instead of guesswork.

So, if you're headed to San Diego this year, I'd encourage you to treat the Utilities, Telecom, and Water pavilion as more than just a stop on your way to somewhere else. Walk it slowly, ask the hard questions, and think about which of these capabilities could close a gap your organization has been living with for too long.

See you in San Diego!

If I missed a stop you're excited about, let me know, I'd love to hear what caught your eye on the floor.