Pitney Bowes and IBM collaborate on hybrid cloud location services

Pitney Bowes Inc. and IBM announced on March 25 a collaboration on IBM’s codename BlueMix platform-as-a-service to develop new hybrid cloud location services that help businesses unearth deeper connections between their customers, their geography, and their networks to deliver more personalized services and contextually relevant experiences.

IBM’s BlueMix is a new development environment that helps clients and developers speed the adoption of hybrid clouds. The initiative combines the strength of IBM software, third-party and open technologies. 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 (PaaS).

More than 1.2 billion people around the world today use Pitney Bowes location intelligence solutions when they check in or use location-sharing features on major social media platforms. Pitney Bowes’ location intelligence suite of products offers the most comprehensive capabilities to provide 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.

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, through IBM’s API Management to an extended ecosystem of innovators and developers. It also speeds the availability of new services from Pitney Bowes to vast new markets globally.

“Together, IBM and Pitney Bowes are developing a powerful lineup of cloud services around mobile application development and location intelligence,” said Steve Robinson, general manager of IBM Cloud Platform Services. “This open-platform collaboration will inspire development that accelerates innovation and fosters growth.”

“Companies need tools and expertise to manage and integrate APIs, leverage location intelligence and customer data, and then seamlessly extend their services to reach their customers via the cloud and mobile devices,” said Roger Pilc, chief innovation officer for Pitney Bowes. “We look forward to delivering Pitney Bowes digital commerce solutions on IBM’s BlueMix.”