You Can't Kill Jack Dangermond's Company. Try, And It Will Only Get Stronger.

It’s not often that a tech company survives a shift in computing, let alone two.

But don’t tell that to Jack Dangermond. His company, the digital mapping pioneer Esri , is the rare business that has survived at least five tectonic shifts in technology. More than four decades after its founding, the privately-held company, though hardly a household name, has millions of devoted fans and remains at the top of its game. In the process, it has become something of an object lesson in reinvention.

“We not only survived but thrived,” says Dangermond, Esri’s low-key, 69-year-old billionaire CEO, who co-founded the company with his wife Laura.

Started in 1969, when its software ran on minicomputers, Esri is now being used by some 350,000 businesses, government agencies and NGOs around the world who collectively create some 150 million new maps every day. Over the years, the company embraced computer workstations, PCs, servers, the Web and mobile devices. As it surfed wave after technological wave, Esri also managed to defy predictions that it would be crushed by Google , whose multi-billion dollar investments in “geo” technology made it synonymous with digital mapping.

On Tuesday, Jack and Laura Dangermond are being honored for one of Esri’s enduring legacies: its contributions to environmental protection. For the past 25 years, the company, which is based in Redlands, Calif., some 60 miles east of Los Angeles, has distributed its software virtually free to some 11,000 NGOs. The organizations have used it to map bird habitats, delineate sensitive ecosystems, identify areas of the rainforest that are crucial to absorbing greenhouse gases and myriad other ways as they fought to protect the environment.

“It’s hard to imagine any company that has done more for conservation planning over the last four decades than Esri,” says David Yarnold, the president and CEO of the National Audubon Society, which is honoring Jack and Laura Dangermond with its prestigious Audubon Medal. Past honorees include the likes of Rachel Carson, Ted Turner and Jimmy Carter. While the award is being given to Dangermonds, it is one of the first times that Audubon is giving out the medal to recognize the work of a corporation. “They are a model for what corporate America could do,” Yarnold adds.

While Esri's is honored for its environmental legacy, Yarnold says none of it would have been possible were it not for the company ability to reinvent itself again and again. “Tell me of another tech company that has occupied a space and dominated it for so long,” Yarnold says. “In 2010, after being an enterprise company based on proprietary tools, the long-time owner says to his team, ‘We have to completely change direction, we have to go to the Web and let millions use our tools, not just the experts.’”

One secret of Esri’s resilience is its commitment to research and development. The company invests roughly 28% of its $1.4 billion in annual sales in R&D. By comparison, tech giants like Microsoft and Google invest roughly 13% of the revenue in R&D. Esri now has some 3,600 employees in the United States and another 5,500 in units and subsidiaries around the world.

Virtually every government agency, from cities, counties and police departments, to the U.S. Geological Service and the National Park Service use Esri’s maps to pinpoint roads, pipes, culverts and property boundaries, and to manage crime or natural resources. Esri's tools are also a mainstay of utilities, and companies in transportation and logistics, oil and gas exploration, mining and forestry.

Dangermond says he always saw Esri’s software, which melds maps with rich data sources, powerful analytic tools, and services that can communicate with enterprise programs like Salesforce.com and Microsoft Office or Sharepoint, as fundamentally different from Google’s maps, which are aimed at consumers. “They are driven by providing free maps to billions of people and have a very light view,” Dangermond says. “We are driven by providing technology to enterprise customers. There’s a huge gap there.”

Not everyone saw it that way. Disruption often begins with low-end technology that gradually moves up-market, and many analysts believed that Google would encroach into Esri’s territory. Dangermond admits that some of Google’s technological advances, like its Web-based maps that could be dragged around with a mouse, served as something of a wake-up call to Esri, which had to play catch up.

What's more, Google clearly had designs on the business market and developed a number of products to serve enterprise customers. (It also serves some of the same NGOs that have used Esri’s tools for environmental protection, public health and humanitarian aid.) But earlier this year, Google said it was scaling back some of its enterprise mapping efforts and that it would work with Esri to transition users of Google Earth Enterprise and Google Maps Engine, two business-focused products, to Esri.

“Google has been an amazing benefit for our business,” says Dangermond. “People understand the whole world of mapping and want to do more than not get lost. They want to do spatial analytics. It’s been fantastic for us.” Then he adds: “These guys are our friends.”