Pitney Bowes Business Insight to Unveil the Pitney Bowes Spectrum™ Technology Platform at GeoCommunity ‘09

First Enterprise Data Quality Platform to Integrate Location Intelligence and Data Governance

Windsor, 17 September 2009 – Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI), the leading global provider of data quality, geocoding and location intelligence offerings, today announced the release of the Pitney Bowes Spectrum™ Technology Platform, the first enterprise data quality platform to integrate Location Intelligence and Data Governance capabilities.

Pitney Bowes Spectrum Technology Platform is a next generation enterprise solution family that supersedes the customer data quality platform and will house complimentary data domains such as location. Available on this platform are five elements: data services delivered as part of enterprise data quality, data governance, enterprise location intelligence, data integration and business services addressing specific business process challenges. This provides organisations with a comprehensive platform for enterprise-wide data quality, optimising business operations and delivering meaningful insight.

The Spectrum Technology Platform solves data quality problems associated with customer, location and product data domains. It is the first platform to offer integrated enterprise location intelligence capabilities, enabling organisations to better understand their customers and assets in terms of geographic location.

Brand new to the platform is an Enterprise Routing Module that can serve as part of a comprehensive location intelligence solution, or as a stand-alone business service. It enables companies to optimise and manage their travel and logistics operations, or inform critical decision-making with respect to opening or closing brick and mortar establishments. The routing functionality is available in over 30 countries.

The Spectrum Technology Platform will be showcased at the Association for Geographic Information’s annual conference, GeoCommunity ’09, which takes place 22-24 September in Stratford-upon-Avon.

“Organisations are beginning to realise the ramifications of poor data quality, but they don’t always know where to begin in terms of starting a data quality initiative,” said Burchard Hillmann-Koester, Product Marketing Manager for EMEA, Pitney Bowes Business Insight. “As a single, service-oriented platform, the modular nature of the Pitney Bowes Spectrum Technology Platform enables companies to select the services that best fit their business needs today and enables them to lay out a data quality foundation that grows with the organisation.”

Rich in functionality, the Pitney Bowes Spectrum Technology Platform includes four core elements:

Enterprise Data Quality Solution: Enables business users, administrators and data stewards alike to standardise, cleanse, validate, update and enhance customer data using either batch or real-time services.

Enterprise Data Governance Solution: Enables organisations to better understand, profile and monitor the quality of business data.

Enterprise Location Intelligence Solution: Extends the value of business data through the addition of geographic and location-based data enabling spatial analysis and modelling to become part of the data management process.

Data Integration Solution: Enables organisations to access, combine and deliver information from disparate data sources and enterprise systems such as CRM and ERP.

In addition to the four core elements, The Pitney Bowes Spectrum Technology Platform also features Business Services, a set of capabilities designed to solve business problems ranging from inconsistent data entry to monitoring global watch-lists.

The launch of The Spectrum Technology Platform follows the recent PBBI-sponsored report “The State of Data Quality Today” published by The Information Difference, a UK analyst firm focused on master data management (MDM). The report highlights that companies still find the issue of maintaining accurate data a major challenge and the majority of organisations have made no attempt to quantify the true business cost of poor quality data in their organisations, potentially costing them millions of pounds in lost revenue every year.

Key findings from “The State of Data Quality Today” include:
- One third of respondents rate their data quality as poor at best and only 4 percent rate it as excellent
- 63 percent of respondents said their organisation has made no attempt to calculate the cost to the business of errors in data arising from poor quality data
- Two thirds of respondents acknowledged that they have issues with non-standard data, data that is incorrect, or data with missing attributes that require correction
- Only 9 percent of respondents had a fully automated data management system in place

A webinar discussing “The State of Data Quality Today” hosted by the report’s author Andy Hayler, CEO of The Information Difference, takes place on Friday 18 September at 4.00 pm BST. Click here for further information and to sign-up for the webinar.