Pitney Bowes Pays Premium for MapInfo

Pitney Bowes (PBI) has made a play for the location intelligence market today by buying MapInfo offering over $20 per share or 50% over yesterday’s close of $13.21. It’s in the business of location technology already as it owns Group 1 Software (acquired in 2004), maker of geocoding and address validation software. I think Pitney Bowes sees the oncoming wave of location-based business intelligence (BI). They’ve got the important piece that companies look for initially which is georeferencing a corporate database; now they are angling for more of the analytical space. It’s a good move but I think they’ll have name recognition problems if they dismiss the MapInfo brand. They didn’t do it with Group 1 so I suspect MapInfo will still be around in some form. Although I would predict that those units would merge.

By way of history, it was Group 1 that acquired Sagent, which had acquired QMS, all of which had solutions for data QA and geocoding. Last year, Microsoft had selected Group 1 for its geocoding engine to support some of its online mapping systems. So, I suspect that PBI can now offer and promote more "location intelligent" (formerly business geographics) solutions and go after other enterprise opportunities. PBI has a market cap of $10B and could try to secure a piece of the BI market.

MapInfo now has a big brother with some cash. Will Pitney Bowes try to acquire a BI company like Information Builders or Business Objects? I think that would be a very significant move and if they choose correctly could develop a niche market for a piece of the enterprise market that wants to spatially enable its customer database quickly.