Going geospatial with Pitney Bowes

The combination of geographic information systems and direct, online marketing tools is one of those applications mashups that, for sales and marketing personnel at least, seem like a marriage made in heaven. And Pitney Bowes is joining in the development of this new marketplace with the launch of the latest version of Spectrum Spatial.

This platform, built on MapInfotechnology, has been designed to deliver advanced location intelligence that enables businesses to centrally manage and deliver location data. Companies can apply this technology across departments and applications to address diverse business challenges.

“We are helping ‘marry’ organizational data with location to help businesses make critical decisions that improve performance.”

As an increasing volume of personal and business interactions now take place on tablets and smartphones, a company’s ability to instantaneously talk to, text, market, and otherwise sell to their customers with relevant content has come to be expected.

Savvy businesses are using location information to better communicate with customers, create more targeted promotions, and promote sophisticated cross-selling opportunities.

This trend, known as the consumerisation of GIS, increasingly requires non-GIS experts to build and support location-based applications and services. Clients who use Pitney Bowes’ MapInfo product were a key driver for this new platform and its relevance in the market.

“Pitney Bowes’ location intelligence solutions, such as Spectrum Spatial, enable clients to answer a fundamental, yet complex question faced by nearly all organisations: where? It's a critical factor in countless strategic and operational decisions,” said James Buckley, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Location Intelligence, Pitney Bowes. “We are helping ‘marry’ organisational data with location to help businesses make critical decisions that improve performance.”

Over 80 percent of all business data has a location component to it which can then be exploited by businesses to increase their sales opportunities. For example, social media companies can use this technology to identify location information associated with status updates and other location-tagged content for social sharing, financial services companies can select optimal branch sites, re-evaluate underperforming branches and increase customer service by installing ATM locators and insurance providers can improve underwriting decisions, manage risk on a portfolio basis and streamline the claims management process.

The new version of Spectrum Spatial features BI integration that adds location intelligence to business intelligence, and address management, geocoding and reverse geocoding that validates, standardises and corrects addresses in 250 countries/territories. Geocoding and reverse geocoding capabilities provide a precise set of coordinates based on the X and Y axis.

Spatial data analysis provideseasy-to-use functionality such as `Find Nearest’ which locates the points of interest that are nearest to a given location, as well as locate distance between two points. It also provides the ability to obtain driving or walking directions, calculate drive time/distance, and identify locations within a certain time or distance from a starting point.

A packaged,  browser-based mappingapplication allows users, based on their access rights, the ability to interact with data and spatial information on an intuitive mapping interface to better communicate or facilitate more effective decisions.

The company has also announced an OEM partnership with SAPPitney Bowes will develop new geospatial and location intelligence solutions using the SAP HANA platform.