Cloud service navigates data fog

Beverley Head
Tuesday, 15 June 2010 15:05

IT Industry - Deals

Pitney Bowes MapInfo has announced a $76 million plan to buy Portrait Software, which will plug a CRM and marketing analytics gap in its portfolio and ultimately extend the range of services the company can bring to the market through its emerging cloud based strategy.

Robert Pipe, vice president of product management and marketing for Pitney Bowes Business Insight, was in Australia last week for user meetings to outline the company's new products and cloud strategy. It announced its Stratus cloud based plans in May, and plans to launch the services later this year.

Over the last six years the company, best known for revolutionising the postage business with its franking machines, began diversifying, buying software companies such as Group 1 and MapInfo (Portrait will be its 25th acquisition). According to Pipe, Pitney Bowes' software business is now worth over $US360 million.

Pipe said that one of the key market differentiators of the company was Pitney Bowe's concentration on delivering information to customers which included a location aspect. With MapInfo Professional for example it would be possible for insurance companies to analyse their risk by mapping customer data against known flood or fire zones.

In Australia the company has already a sizeable user community particularly in local government with Brisbane City Council, Shepparton Council and the City of Sydney being users. Other local users include Harley Davidson, Weight Watchers Australia, Vodafone Hutchison Australia  and Harvey World Travel.

Pitney Bowes Business Insight is now making these sorts of location dependent applications available as a service, and has an early adopter programme operating in the US for its Stratus cloud solution. Pipe claimed that the system's simple interface would allow even unsophisticated users access to location related information, such as sales activity or competitive threats in a particular area.

Although the cloud service has early adopters in the UK and US, there are no local pioneers of the service, which is expected to be formally launched in September. In terms of a competitive niche Pipe said that MapInfo Stratus sat between offerings such as Google Maps and Bing and more traditional graphical information systems such as ESRI.

The company is also now talking up its next cloud based service, codenamed Project Miami, which will provide access to data as a service.