I came across this pre – ESRI User Conference 2010 question - “What is ESRI doing with LiDAR?”. As you can see the answer indicates that they can load LAS files and/or convert the point cloud data into a raster elevation grid – nothing new there.
What caught my attention was the last comment concerning work being done on native support for point clouds. Now that is what we wanted to hear. This would have a very beneficial effect on the demand for LiDAR data.
Big change for ESRI. A year or so ago they said they were going to leave LiDAR support to 3rd party developers.