The Perfect Storm

Weather Central, a Madison, Wis.-based solution provider, is the world's leading provider of digital on-air, online and print weather and forecasting systems.

"We've just set our sights on the global market in the last couple of years," said Steve Smedberg, vice president of marketing and product management. "Domestically and in Canada, the number of broadcasters is pretty much fixed. We have 50 percent of the market, but it's not growing to the degree that media is in other parts of the world," he said.

Luckily for Weather Central, weather is a universal language. The company sells turnkey graphic systems that allow broadcasters, newspapers and Web publishers to produce high-quality weather graphics for their viewers or readers. In addition, the company generates its own weather data, which it then sells to its global customer base.

And the company has plans to integrate its weather graphic systems with ones for traffic data.

"Our big pushes are in penetrating the global market with our core weather solution as well as expanding our product offerings," Smedberg said. "We now have a traffic solution as well. When you combine traffic and weather together, those are two things that have meaning to each individual viewer. The weather matters to pretty much everyone."

To facilitate its global push, Smedberg said Weather Central has chosen to partner with in-country companies that have close ties with both the government weather agencies and local broadcasters.

"In the U.S., we sell direct to the customers, but in international markets we try to find local partners. Each country has some form of meteorological wing of government. We want partners that are familiar with the government weather entity or with local broadcasters," he said.

Earlier this year, Weather Central also switched its primary hardware vendor from Dell to Hewlett-Packard. Part of the decision was based on technological merit.

Smedberg said that the company's systems need to be able to produce complex, high-quality graphics, such as cloud animation, in realtime. "The HP machines have the ability to do the heavy lifting," he said.

And with customers on every continent except Antarctica, Weather Central needed a company that could support it on a global basis. "HP has a huge worldwide footprint," Smedberg said.

In addition, Weather Central needed local mapping images to weave in with its 3-D interactive on-air software applications.

Earlier this year, the company signed an alliance with Microsoft for the software vendor's Virtual Earth, which helps integrate worldwide aerial satellite imagery and mapping technology with Weather Central's weather data.

Smedberg said he figures the vendor alliances coupled with Weather Central's proprietary weather data create a perfect storm, helping the solution provider to realize its global ambitions.

"Anyone can go out and get information about the weather from a zillion different places on the Internet," Smedberg said. "What you can't get is the science that combines data in order to compare it to the past and state-of-the-art weather modeling to figure out what the data means based on the best science," he said.