CRM- September 2008 - (Page 14) CRM TRENDS AND NEWS ANALYSIS W Bowes MapInfo, which was acquired by mail and messaging solutions provider Pitney Bowes in March 2007, announced the integration of its Location Intelligence Component (LIC) for the IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence platform this past June. Previously, the two vendors supported a partnership that allowed customers to utilize both solutions, but the process was inefficient and cumbersome. End users would have to jump from Cognos, then perform geospatial rendering on MapInfo, then go back to Cognos. “The workflow was severely impacted,” Campbell says. “The connection between the tools wasn’t there.” After seeing users flip and flop, integration only made sense. “Instead of telling our customers,‘Here’s the tool, go use it,’ we thought, ‘Why are we telling people to do it themselves? We’re the experts at it,’” says Jon Winslow, director of business development at Pitney Bowes MapInfo. According to Winslow, the integration of geospatial intelligence and BI was inevitable. “Once you can tie By knowing the “where” in anywhere, business intelligence just your data to some place on Earth, you got a whole lot smarter can really start to understand the context stream consumer electronics are around it,” he says. The LIC provides hen Don Campbell wanted to measure the equipped with location-based tech- what Winslow calls a “bidirectional exact length of garden nologies such as radio-frequency identi- functionality,” enabling users to take a hose he needed for his fication (RFID) or the global positioning report, put it on a map, select the most yard, he didn’t count how many steps it system (GPS). In addition, an individ- relevant items on a map, and filter it took to cover the distance. He didn’t use ual’s location can be estimated based through Cognos—seamlessly. Whereas time-based a piece of string and measure it section on cellular triangulation by by section against a ruler. He didn’t even measuring distance and sig- Integration of geospatial trend-mapping was the core of BI, with the addiuse his five-meter-long retractable meas- nal strength between cell intelligence and tion of spatial informauring tape. What the chief technology towers. “All these things are tion, BI is reaching a whole officer of Cognos, an IBM company spe- coinciding,” Campbell says. business intelligence other level, says Henry cializing in business intelligence, did use The disconnect, however, was inevitable. Morris, senior vice presiwas the simple point-to-point measur- occurs once you step in the office: “I come into the business world dent of worldwide software and services ing tool on Google Earth. With the relatively recent advent of and I’m frustrated with the fact that I research at analysis firm IDC. “If ZIP technology such as Google Earth and don’t have the same kind of tools for a Codes were good enough, then you wouldn’t need any of this,” he says. UnGoogle Maps, consumers have (free!) business need,” he says. To address this growing demand, loca- fortunately, ZIP Codes—and even the access to incredible geospatial information. Moreover, many of today’s main- tion intelligence solutions provider Pitney more-precise ZIP+4s—don’t dive deep Locating Intelligence 14 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | SEPTEMBER 2008 www.destinationCRM.com http://www.destinationCRM.com
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