Pitney Bowes aims to be digital commerce, cloud player
Pitney Bowes is launching a series of cloud services and partnering with a bevy of technology providers in a move that is aimed at transforming the company one that revolves around digital commerce.
Pitney Bowes is best known for its mailing and shipping systems, but the company is launching a Commerce Cloud to double down on digital.
The company, best known for its postage meters and shipping tools, launched the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud, which offers everything from analytics, application programming interfaces and payment management as goods ship.
Pitney Bowes' ambitions revolve around expansion and reinventing its business. To provide the end-to-end shipping and customer visibility, Pitney Bowes is building on GE's Predix Internet of things cloud, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, Apigee, MongoDB and Okta. These technology partnerships illustrate how a more old-line business can connect applications to spin up new tools.
The Commerce Cloud will be rolled out through 2016.
The company's Commerce Cloud aims to combine its core shipping and mailing tools and combine them with commerce, customer engagement and analytics and location intelligence.
It's not like Pitney Bowes hasn't had digital services before, but the additions to its suite represent a big expansion. Pitney Bowe's has a office shipping application called SendPro that manages deliveries through multiple avenues. SendPro will be a part of the Commerce Cloud.
Pitney Bowes APIs will be available to developers to plug into their applications. The Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud today includes smart postage, mailing tools, data quality applications, interactive video, international shipping, cross-border shopping, financial services and transportation, asset and package management.
Tools such as location intelligence, customer engagement and information management will roll out through the year.