Maponics Gets Geographic With It

Company:

Headquarters: Norwich, Vt.

Technology Sector: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Data Provider

Key Product: Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries

Year Founded: 2001

Number of Channel Partners: 10

Ideal Channel Partner: Solution Providers/Business Process Consultants

Why You Should Care: Maponics provides neighborhood boundary data to enable customers and channel partners to provide contextual data and interactive maps that improve real estate and local search.

The Lowdown: Maponics isn't your typical IT channel vendor. The Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data provider serves up deep-drilling information about geographic areas all the way down to the carrier route level -- "where the postman walks his route," said Mark Friend, vice president of sales and marketing at the nine-year-old Vermont company.

In other words, traditional resellers of computer hardware and software may have a tough time figuring out how to work the vendor's Neighborhood Boundaries data services into their portfolio. But for larger affiliates-- Maponics counts Pitney Bowes and Fusion Development Group as resellers -- selling the company's raw data or bundling it into information sets is a great way to get customers started on custom mapping and geographical analytics for everything from sales and marketing to distribution.

"The primary verticals for us are real estate, enterprise customers, government, utilities and local search companies," said Friend. "Our ideal channel partner would focus on providing solutions that enable their customers to view data geographically, regardless of the business size."

Maponics is not a large company -- today it counts only about 25 employees, most of them crunching the numbers that it uses to define what Friend refers to as "polygons." In simple terms, Maponics is in the business of defining geographical territories at various levels, using, for example, the tens of millions of data points related to extended ZIP + 4 codes.

The company, which is now expanding beyond U.S. mapping to develop GIS data sets for Canada and parts of Europe, had been building custom maps for several years before realizing that "there was a need for the data that was inside these custom maps," Friend said, tracing the history of Maponics.

"At that point, we produced our first GIS data set, the carrier route product. That gets to the heart of our value proposition, creating a nationwide database of polygons that change quite a bit because we update those quarterly," he said.