Vince Poscente, a former Canadian Olympic star in speed skiing delivered a rousing keynote address at the Pitney Bowes MapWorld Conference last week, a merged event between the user groups of MapInfo and Group 1. Now a motivational speaker, Poscente provided a exhilarating ride into the world of business strategy and how to deal with a few bumps along the way. And in his case, a bump led to losing a medal at the 1992 Olympics.

Poscente offered that in today’s business climate he defines companies in four categories:
The Zeppelin, a lumbering giant with little forward motion.
The Balloon, something that just floats along with a few ups and downs along the way.
The Bottle Rocket, a high flier at first but one likely to fizzle later and drop like a stone.
The Jet, where alignment and speed must coincide to achieve optimum results.

The Pitney Bowes MapInfo and Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software divisions will be going through a gradual transition to a new name. Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI?) will be introduced throughout the fall. During this time, the MapInfo name is NOT disappearing and the company will still be focusing on location intelligent solutions. Mike Hickey, current president of both divisions will remain as president and will now directly report to the CEO of Pitney Bowes. Hickey said the name change underwent substantial vetting.

My take: At first, I thought it was a clever way to use "BI" as a double meaning but Hickey says that was mere coincidence. The name is OK. It's not lightening in a bottle but is not bland either. It says what they do and that's enough. In general, what you have to appreciate is that the combined entity has a lot of products and a substantial cache of very targeted solutions. The trick, as the company fully appreciates, is that they need to find a workflow to offer clients that clearly shows how the solutions can be used in tandem, or not. PBBI has several stand alone products that don't need to be integrated. Naming is important and not trivial but perhaps of secondary concern to explaining that value of the solutions.

I participated on a panel at the Pitney Bowes MapWorld conference on what was to be a discussion of the trends on Location Intelligence. But the panel quickly turned the discussion toward a rather lengthy dialog on spatial databases and whether the kinds of transaction limitations in Oracle Spatial or MS SQL Server warrant putting ALL geospatial data into the database.

Here in "Sin City" there are discussions that will hopefully lead to a more "heavenly" host of ideas as this first, combined meeting of the user groups from MapInfo and Group 1 customers gets underway. MapWorld '08 is the first conference held jointly with those users from Group 1 Software since Pitney Bowes (PB) acquired MapInfo last year.