Yesterday I spoke w/ Berkley Charlton, who is a director of product management at MapInfo Pitney Bowes Software. Apologies to Berk if I got his title wrong - he admitted he's still working on figuring out exactly what his new title should be. He's a long-time business GIS type, and he remembers meeting me first in 1994 when he was with Strategic Mapping and I was working at Business Geographics magazine.

Our chat helped me understand how the Centrus division of Group 1 (Group 1 was acquired by Pitney Bowes in 2004, and Pitney Bowes acquired MapInfo this year,) fits in to MapInfo. The Centrus division, headquartered in Boulder, CO, and about 50 people strong, was commonly referred to as the "business geographics" group. According to Berk, Group 1 and MapInfo have been brought together as one entity, called Pitney Bowes Software. The Centrus Division of Group 1 Software was integrated into MapInfo immediately after the Pitney Bowes acquisition of MapInfo, and it was announced in the fall that Group1 and MapInfo would be merging operations. Said Charlton, "Really the only noticeable area of overlap was with the Centrus group in Group 1 and MapInfo."

The Centrus division has built and managed a geo-suite of products that are operational in nature (e.g. they handle millions of similar transactions in what can best be thought of as back room processing) including GeoStan, Spatial Plus and GeoTAX. An example of an industry that makes extensive use of these products is insurance underwriting, for example. The point-in-polygon and polygon-in-polygon capabilities available in these tools help insurers decide whether and how to insure properties. MapInfo also works extensively with the insurance industry, but Charlton characterized their applications as "analytical," and would help with actuarial activities (e.g. setting up the rules by which insurance policies would be written).

According to Charlton, the challenged have been fairly minimal in terms of how the Centrus group is adapting to the merger. "We need to focus on the operational aspects of the market - we need to make sure these kinds of transactions don't become viewed as a commodity," he said.