Location Intelligence @ Pitney Bowes

Recently I attended a session on the LI offerings of Pitney Bowes. The session was organized in partnership with Pitney Bowes (PB) and the speaker was a GIS consultant from PB.

PB along with ESRI are two of the foremost vendors in the Location Intelligence space catering to the LI needs of government and private sector enterprises. Following are some of the important applications of LI cited by PB during the session:
  • Forest Survey of India – This is a government organization in India which makes use of LI capabilities to survey, assess and monitor the cover of forests in India
  • Aviation Sector – In the aviation sector LI capabilities are used for flight tracking 
  • Flood hazard mapping – helps in effective prediction of areas which are more prone to flooding
  • Community transportation – Optimization of the transportation routes within the City 
  • Public health – proximity tracking of hospitals w.r.t the patients helping identify new areas where health services need to be reached
  • Coastal management – surveying and monitoring the flora and fauna of the coastal regions
  • Natural resources management – tracking the availability and usage of the natural resources spread across the country
  • Energy sector – asset management, facility management, distribution of energy. British Gas is making use of LI capabilities of PB in Gujarat for household gas distribution
Some of the important capabilities which PB has in the LI field are:
  • A wide array of tools to cater the LI needs of business. PB provides tools which are desktop, web and mobile enabled.
  • Server based components for large scale enterprise deployments of LI
  • Geocoding services
  • Integration with other BI platforms such as Cognos, MicroStrategy, Qlik etc.
  • Location and GIS based industry data sources for business consumption
MapInfo Professional is the most widely used tool of PB. MapInfo is built on a dot net based platform. Some of the important features of this tool highlighted during the session are as listed below.
  • MapInfo supports hundreds of different coordinate systems. So any coordinate data which is collected by a GPS device can be fed into MapInfo as source
  • MapInfo provides comprehensive drawing and editing features. Any specified area can be drawn on a map using this tool
  • SQL language support for querying and searching. Multiple datasets can be joined and intuitive SQL queries can be written. The data thus retrieved can be represented on maps
  • The tool supports a number of visualizations for representation of the data. There is also the facility distance calculators for performing proximity analysis
  • PB has introduced a new concept called Multi Resolution Raster (MRR) which helps MapInfo to analyze large sets of spatial data such as those gathered from remote sensing satelites
  • Crystal Reports is pre-integrated into the platform thus providing the basic BI capabilities
  • Customization of the tool is also possible using the Dot Net platform
Apart from that some of the business specific tools are as listed below:

Desktop
  • MapInfo Professional
  • Crime Profiler – for crime analysis
  • Confirm – for assessment management
  • Discover – surface mining
  • Discover 3D – mining of sub surface structures
  • Paramics – transportation and traffic management
Web
  • Spectrum Spatial Analyst – web component of Spectrum Spatial Enterprise Solution
Data Products
  • Street Pro –dataset for street, address, transport and points of interest
  • Geocoding
  • Routing – algorithm of optimized routes for logistics usage
  • Demographic – population data
For enterprise deployment PB has the component known as Spectrum Enterprise Spatial Solution. This component also provides the ability of PB to integrate with other BI tools. The BI platforms which are supported are:
  • BIRT
  • IBM Cognos 8.4 to 10.2.2
  • IBM Cognos Express
  • Microsoft Excel 2003 to 2013 (32 and 64 bit versions)
  • Microsoft Reporting services 2005-2012
  • MicroStrategy 9.4 to 10
  • OBIEE 11
  • Qlikview 10 to 11.2
  • SAP BO XI 2.5 to 4.1
  • Tableau 8.3 to 9.0.4