Why does my wife not believe these trips are all work?
Yes you did read that right. It was one of the more eye catching things I learnt last week on the first day of the EMEA PBBI partner conference in Prague. I thought I would try to bring you a few highlights of the event. As many of you know I spend most of my time in Eastern Europe when I’m not at home, working with an extremely enthusiastic and diverse group of PBBI partners. It is always eye opening to see your technology being used far and wide, and a stark reminder that when we first come out with an idea for something, you can rely on our partners to take it further and wider, and use it in ways we never imagined.
So in the first afternoon in the emerging markets group, we had a round robin of partners presenting on some of their projects that they have been working on in the past twelve months. As the first partner meeting for all PBBI partners there is more diversity than ever.
Kicking off the partners was Anton Minton from Xerox in Russia discussing how their project combined E2 vault, Sagent Dataflow and E2 online management. This was new territory to some degree to me, as it is all on the CCM (customer communication management) line of business. Check out the links for more on our CCM stack. Slightly more familiar ground followed from Jeff Connacher of ST Group from South Africa. I say slightly because although ST Group are more closely aligned with the GIS space, Jeff actually talked about work they had done with a product from another PBBI partner called Dynamics Designs. The product in question is Connect Master, a specialist tool for the Telco industry combining aspects of things like Microsoft Visio, and MapXtreme.Net to give an off the shelf asset/inventory management system. ST Group have successfully implemented Connect Master to several large and small Telco providers in South Africa, helping them to get a grip on just which cables are where, as well as planning for future growth.
Melinda Szélpál from Varinex in Hungary gave us a classic 1-0-1 in thematic mapping and how some of the retail organisations are moving further and further into their analysis as more varied data becomes available, including customer incomes, spend per capita, competitor analysis and so on. This was a theme followed and built on by Tamás Prajczer from GeoX. It was Tamás who gave us “pill popping” insight via one of his thematic maps that sales of Viagra were substantially higher in Western Hungary, subsequently explained by Austrians hopping over the border to purchase at a much lower cost. Tamás also showed us some pretty cool maps on “wordles” gathered on the internet, trending topics and so on, and then embedded within geographical boundaries.
Avi spells out the age old industry problem for us.
The afternoon concluded with two more presentations, firstly from Rajeev Saraf of Lepton Maps in India and finally from Avi Avni from MapIT from Israel. Rajeev talked about putting together a winning combination of Google maps, offering user familiarity and good user experience, and PBBI’s MapXtreme for added functionality to provide their Enterprise Access software. Interestingly that was also a theme that came from Korem the following day around combining Google and PBBI. Avi wrapped up proceedings by showing his map report product which has a very noble goal. Taking GIS to the mainstream worker. A problem that still plagues the GIS industry is that there are still too few people seeing the value of mapping analysis within an organisation. It aims to do this by without burdening IT departments and still providing a simple scalable solution by building very simple bridges from MapInfo Professional to a Business Intelligence platform with minimum effort. Ultimately users of this can go from reports to useful maps in under two minutes.
So in a brief afternoon we saw just how far some of our partners reach from South Africa to Russia and everywhere in between. Plus, you also know where to get cheap Viagra, one for the pub quiz I think,
Enjoy,
Chris M
0 Response to “Austrians travel to Hungary for cheap Viagra…”
Guidelines for Comments: The PB Software Stratus is hosted by Pitney Bowes Inc. By using this Blog you agree that you are solely responsible for any comment you post to the Blog and you agree to abide and be bound by the Pitney Bowes TERMS OF USE.
Please stay on topic. We may redirect certain submissions if they are better handled through another channel such as customer service. With regard to the content of any submissions you make through this Blog, you agree to remain solely responsible and agree to not submit materials that are unlawful, defamatory, abusive or obscene. You also agree that you will not submit anything to this Blog that violates any right of a third party, including copyright, trademark, privacy or other personal or proprietary rights.
Pitney Bowes reserves the right to terminate your ability to use and/or submit posts to this Blog. Pitney Bowes may not review all postings and is not responsible for comments posted on this Blog. Pitney Bowes nevertheless retains the right to not post, edit a posting or to remove any postings in its sole and absolute discretion.
Opinions expressed by authors and commenters of this blog are theirs alone, and do not represent Pitney Bowes' position, strategies and opinions. Pitney Bowes is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information supplied in this blog.