The value of cloud computing is reaching another giant of the business world with some help from WeoGeo, an emerging geodata service provider.
Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI) is developing a “Data as a Service” (DaaS) platform that it is calling “Project Miami”. The company will use the WeoGeo platform to offer its geodata to Pitney Bowes customers. PBBI will integrate WeoGeo as a SaaS. Project Miami will go live in June.
Pitney Bowes sees the cloud a rich place to serve its data to clients. But, according to Ventana Research, it took some time to get there. It’s a new initiative came to lie after the less than optimum integrations it did in recent acquisitions such as MapInfo.
According to Ventana, Pitney Bowes President Mike Hickey said the company made the shift to a DaaS after a year of discussions with employees and customers.
The new approach is a departure for Pitney Bowes from its focus on software. The new service will provide customers with a range of analytics-based data that will give it the capability to offer customers services such as “location intelligence.”
Ventana:
“It is clear that PBBI is making a major step to embrace cloud computing and the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model in which technology tools can be rented and data can be purchased in an online marketplace but how far and fast they can transform is yet not clear. Cloud computing is part of an industry transition to simpler access to applications and services, along with technology infrastructure, that in a traditional enterprise data center would be complicated and expensive to install, configure and maintain.”
PBBI is also partnering with Microsoft Bing. Aerial and hybrid imagery will be integrated with street map data.
This is where WeoGeo comes into the story. Geodata needs to be readily available to work with the location intelligence in the PBBI data portfolio.
WeoGeo will provide the geospatial content. According to the PBBI web site, Project Miami Marketplace key features allow the user to browse, view and select the content that fits the needs of their organization.
Before, customers would only see a thumbnail image. Only after getting CD or DVD did the customer get to see the data.