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February 2010 | Volume 13 / Number 2
Feature Story

PBBI’s Hat Trick: Billing, Location Intelligence & Customer Data Quality Help Pitney Bowes Address Service Provider Needs

By: Paula Bernier

Pitney Bowes Business Insight (News - Alert) is best known for its expertise in billing. While that remains a core competency for the company, PBBI has a three-pronged strategy that includes billing, location intelligence and customer data quality.

The company is the result of the merger of Group1 Software and MapInfo (News - Alert).

Through Group1, which Pitney Bowes acquired in 2004, it gained the ability to offer tax management for assets such as fiber, which can be complex to address given it often crosses geographic tax boundaries. Group1 also had a thriving data quality practice, says Christopher Cherry (News - Alert), director of communications vertical strategy for PBBI. That now allows PBBI to help large service providers put customer addresses in a standard format in their databases. Standardizing address helps service providers as they do data mining and work to minimize the number of returned customer bills. PBBI also can now offer customer communications management around billing, which involves advising service providers on how to design customer bills to make the best use of space for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, he says. The company also helps customers enhance the electronic billing experience by enabling them to do things like send SMS reminders to customers when it makes sense.




MapInfo, acquired by Pitney Bowes in 2007, was known for location intelligence and sold data to the carrier community, mostly for network design and management, and then evolved to customer information and marketing.

Additionally, Pitney has its traditional expertise in the area of billing. That includes software that lets service providers create bills and dynamically put bill messaging on the bill to particular customers. PBBI also can manage how customers get their bills, be it in print or electronically.

For example, the company offers solutions related to postal discounts, and track and trace on mail. To the latter point, when a bill is delivered, the post office scans the code on the bill; the PBBI solution can enable the service provider in turn to be alerted that bill has been delivered.

“It gives them greater visibility into their cash flow, and also credit and collection,” says Cherry.

The company’s $600 million in software revenues are today split evenly among the billing, location intelligence and customer data quality efforts. The global business targets tier 1 and large tier 2 customers in the wireline, wireless and cable TV arenas.

Communications companies use real-time network monitoring services to identify network issues quickly and easily.Cherry says Verizon (News - Alert) uses PBBI’s taxation solution to ensure its assigns the correct tax jurisdiction to its customers. Meanwhile, Orange uses solutions from Pitney Bowes Business Insight to help it identify where in the U.K. it should roll out 3G and 4G. What PBBI offers in this scenario is data that identifies customers that can offer Orange the best revenue and sales prospects.

PBBI is able to offer this kind of guidance because it pulls and analyzes data from a variety of sources, including but not limited to the U.S. Census and Telcordia (News - Alert)’s LERG. (The LERG, or local exchange routing guide, is the routing table for the North American telephone network. The LERG also includes the list of local access transport areas, or LATAs, and operating company numbers, which are commonly used to define interconnect rates between carriers.) PBBI takes data from the LERG and matches it with geographic information to enable service providers to do things such as match a customer address to its serving wire center for preprovisioning, as just one example.

Another prominent wireless operator, Sprint (News - Alert), uses Pitney’s technology to show its network coverage, The carrier has made that information on its Website, says Cherry. Current and potential customers can visit the Sprint Website, input their addresses and see how strong the Sprint signal is in various geographies.

Bell Canada (News - Alert), meanwhile, uses PBBI’s MapExtreme solution to monitor its cellular network towers, Cherry says. A red, yellow, green coding enables technicians at the company to see quickly and easily if a tower is out of service, requires maintenance, or is operating as expected.

Pitney Bowes Business Insight at SUPERCOMM in October announced MapInfo MapXtreme v7.0, the newest version of the software development kit for integrating location intelligence with existing business systems. It can be used to help service providers better manage inventory, allocate resources and market to customers.Applications created with the kit can be deployed on the Web and the desktop, enabling organizations to deliver and share location intelligence analysis across their enterprise.

Flexible online account management helps business customers closely monitor their communications expenses by location to help stay on budget.“Organizations today have access to a wealth of location-based data that can be used to identify new business opportunities and trends, deliver services to citizens, manage infrastructure and communicate effectively with customers and partners,” says Jon Winslow, global portfolio director of location intelligence at Pitney Bowes Business Insight. “MapInfo MapXtreme v7.0 enables developers to incorporate location intelligence throughout their organization, helping drive down operational costs and improve cross-department decisions that impact business growth.”

As PBBI looks forward, it is looking to offer some of its software “by the click” via a software-as-a-service offer, Cherry tells INTERNET TELEPHONY. But he was not ready to disclose details around this effort as of this issue’s deadline in mid-January. IT

Benefits of MapXtreme MapInfo v7.0

By Paula Bernier (News - Alert)

Enhanced Data Access

Developers can extend data access to any data source. By accessing data where it lives and leveraging the most up-to-date data sources, developers can enable more detailed locationbased analysis. MapInfo MapXtreme v7.0 also supports Microsoft (News - Alert) SQL Server 2008 Spatial Data.

Greater Flexibility and Ease of Use

Features such as a new API for the rendering of tiles, an extensible workspace manager and a localization kit provide greater flexibility and increased customization. With localization, developers can now easily customize their location intelligence applications in multiple languages.

Increased Interoperability

MapInfo MapXtreme v7.0 supports Bing and Google (News - Alert) Maps, providing the ability to display and analyze enterprise geographic data in widely used Web mapping services. IT

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