Pitney Bowes moves into big data marketing

Pitney Bowes said its data management expertise is like 'Microsoft Excel on steroid' as it revealed a plan to move into big data analysis and digital communications.

The company, which is a dominant player in the transactional printing space, hopes to use that expertise as it helps technology and marketing services companies like Axciom and Experian better analyse and enhance the vast amounts of data they’ve already acquired.

At its annual Insights conference in the US, John O'Hara, president of Pitney Bowes Business Insight, said, "We believe our heritage in physical will help us breach that digital gap. We have the technology to do that. We're like Microsoft Excel on steroids. We can process up to 3 million PDFs per minute."

Pitney Bowes has plenty of tools at its disposal for this expansion, including Volly, which enables brands to store physical customer communications in an online repository. Pitney Bowes also its own data intelligence/management platform, Spectrum, and recently acquired both MapInfo and Group 1 Software, giving it capabilities in geographic information systems.  

Though it will continue to be in the B2B rather than the consumer space, O'Hara stressed Pitney Bowes will not be moving into traditional CRM.

"We don't want to play in the Salesforce automation place. We don't want to play in the contact space. We append and enhance data capabilities."

This article originally appeared at printweek.com