Pitney Bowes and IBM collaborate on new “Blue Mix” hybrid cloud location services

In an interview with James Fairweather, Vice President of Architecture, Technology and Experience for Pitney Bowes Inc., he answered the following questions about the new collaboration on IBM’s “BlueMix” platform-as-a-service. This collaboration is designed to develop new hybrid cloud location intelligence services that help businesses unearth deeper customer insights based on geography, enabling them to deliver more personalized services and contextually relevant experiences.

1) Can you tell me how hybrid cloud location services are different than other location based services?

“Applications that need to leverage big data-residing in both public and private clouds, especially real-time data and analytics, benefit from hybrid cloud location services. For developers, it’s a system that significantly reduces the time needed to create an application.  For businesses, it’s a system which allows line-of-business users to easily create applications without needing a high level of technical know-how.

A hybrid cloud model allows businesses to reduce the total cost of ownership, rapidly adjust to their customers’ needs and leverage the flexibility that cloud applications provide. This allows for instant updates and new features to be deployed automatically, which translates to high responsiveness from the end-user’s perspective.”

2) How are Pitney Bowes’ key solutions exposed?

“Pitney Bowes and IBM are collaborating on IBM’s codename “BlueMix” Platform-as-a-Service to develop new hybrid cloud location services. BlueMix provides DevOps in the cloud – an open, integrated development experience that scales to any level.  Pitney Bowes is among the first third-party solutions now available to developers and companies on the new IBM BlueMix Platform-as-a-Service.

For Pitney Bowes, the partnership provides the opportunity to expose key solutions such as location-based services, e-commerce fulfillment, Internet postage and parcel management to an extended ecosystem of innovators and developers through IBM’s API Management.  It also increases the availability of new services from Pitney Bowes to vast new markets globally.”

3) Does the hybrid cloud environment integrate with clouds outside the system, and if so, how is that accomplished?

“Yes.  IBM’s Hybrid Cloud solution consolidates and simplifies the integration and management of on-premise and cloud computing resources by bringing together critical end-to-end cloud technologies like Tivoli’s enterprise management capabilities and Cast Iron’s integration technology.  New cloud platforms deliver agile, rapid time-to-value, ease of assembly, and reduced IT needs that are accelerating adoption of the cloud for application development.”

 4) What types of personalized services/experiences do you envision customers providing?

“As the company that defined the term ‘Location Intelligence,’ Pitney Bowes’ location intelligence suite of products offers the most comprehensive capabilities providing businesses with the ability to visualize spatial data and understand relationships between specific locations.

Using advanced, hyper-accurate location data, insurers can improve underwriting decisions, telecommunications providers can better analyze network coverage and retailers can deliver more targeted promotions to consumers based on when and where they are most likely to buy.”

Tags: geospatial, GIS, Google Maps, hybrid cloud location intelligence, IBM, location, mapping, Pitney Bowes

Categories: cloud, geospatial, GIS, LBS, location based services, mapping, mobile, Pitney Bowes Business Insight

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