UDC is excited to announce the formal establishment of its Enterprise Architecture services as a dedicated service area, led by UDC’s Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and Service Area Leader, William Craft. This service offers IT-focused services to utilities in designing, building, and deploying modern GIS architectures for cloud, on-premises, and hybrid solutions. We acknowledge a rising demand for these services as more organizations undergo significant digital transformations to modernize their GIS systems and operations. These large-scale transformation and integration projects require scalable GIS frameworks to support future business and technology needs.
Our Enterprise Architecture services follow best practices from industry-leading architecture frameworks centered around utility initiatives involving physical infrastructure, cloud services, and core geospatial software. UDC’s newly formalized services comprise System Architecture, Cloud Migrations, Security Strengthening, Availability Optimizations, System Health Checks, ArcGIS License Roadmaps, Performance Tuning, Core Software Upgrades, and several Architecture Accelerators.
“Establishing our Enterprise Architecture service area represents a deliberate and organic development in UDC’s advancement as a comprehensive GIS-centric systems integrator. We have provided foundational architecture services to our clients for many years, but by creating a new and independent practice around this existing and ever-evolving offering, first, we significantly intensify the focus moving forward and second, we provide unbiased alternatives to our clients. As our industry transforms, adopting an enterprise approach to GIS IT infrastructure planning, implementation, monitoring, tuning, and maintenance is crucial for the success of our clients and their digital transformation goals. Formalizing UDC’s architecture service provides our clients with practical alternatives.”
Hamid Akhavan, CEO, UDC

Service Area Leader, William Craft, joined UDC in 2022 as a Solution Architect, bringing nearly 20 years of GIS experience to the role. His background includes several years working directly in IT at the utility, which helped shape the services offered within his practice. In previous roles, he oversaw the design, planning, configuration, implementation, administration, and maintenance of Esri-based enterprise GIS technical solutions in addition to managing system upgrades and production rollouts.
As a UDC Solution Architect, he leveraged key expertise in AWS and Microsoft Azure technologies, understanding how these platforms enhance related GIS technologies to support business continuity through high availability and disaster recovery for utilities. In 2024, he received UDC’s Innovation Award for his pioneering work deploying ArcGIS Web Adaptor to a Microsoft Azure web application service.
Leading the Enterprise Architecture service, William helps UDC’s clients maintain an enterprise-wide GIS and deploy modern GIS architectures that scale to meet demand.
“I’m excited to launch UDC’s newest service area focused on modernizing architectures across data centers and within the cloud. Enterprise Architecture is not new to UDC; we’ve been successfully delivering these services for years. Establishing a formal team around Enterprise Architecture signifies our presence in the market and solidifies our commitment to customers for deploying secure, scalable, and durable systems that meet their business objectives.”
William Craft, Vice President Enterprise Architecture, UDC
The new service has recently begun work on two utility projects.
Partnering with Computer Task Group (CTG), UDC is leading the system architecture design tasks for Chugach Electric Association, located in Alaska, and is helping to evaluate the utility’s electric data for the ArcGIS Utility Network. These architecture tasks include reviewing the current-state architecture and system usage metrics, conducting system design workshops with utility stakeholders, capturing functional and non-functional requirements, determining system sizing and configuration specifications, and building nine future system architecture design diagrams.
Grey Forest Utilities (GFU) is implementing an enterprise GIS as part of its initiative to move to Esri’s ArcGIS Utility Network. To support this move, UDC collaborated with the utility to plan a future-state deployment pattern that aligns with GFU’s requirements for availability, sizing, and configuration. UDC also provided support services that included consulting, application enhancements, and training.
To learn more about this service, see our Enterprise Architecture service page and focused System Architecture service page. Contact UDC for further information about how we can help you implement a scalable GIS architecture tailored to your organization.