MapAnything Unveils Spring '17 Updates

MapAnything, a Salesforce.com-backed provider of geo-productivity and location-based business intelligence software, today broadened its tool set, unveiling the Nearby Salesforce Lightning component, the Guide scheduling and routing product, and Live offerings. According to Tom DiVittorio, MapAnything's chief product officer, the Spring '17 release brings several key additions into the MapAnything ecosystem, aiming to reduce the time sales professionals spend on planning their routes while helping them increase their daily output.

Founded in 2009, MapAnything offers enterprise software that strives to help Salesforce.com and ServiceNow users answer the "Where?" questions—where their businesses are currently, and where they would like to be in the future. Using MapAnything's applications, field service and sales reps can evaluate their data on a map to get a visual read, for instance, on the areas they're covering, how to optimize routes and schedules for customer meetings, and how to better plan their workdays. "It's a similar concept to your personal life, where you use things like Google Maps and Waze and Yelp and all sorts of applications that have maps embedded in them, to ultimately make you more productive," DiVittorio says. The software is used by more than 3,000 companies, including large firms such as Time Warner Cable and smaller outfits like Legion Brewing.

MapAnything's Nearby Lightning component allows Salesforce customers to embed maps inside their CRM system's user interface so they don't have to navigate away to view accounts, opportunities, cases, and other relevant information in the vicinity. It also works to notify sales reps about potential opportunities when they are in a given area, allowing them to redirect their attention to deals that might have otherwise been overlooked.

The Global Search function shows users where clients are on the map so that they can better plan their trips. MapAnything’s Routing interface has been improved to determine the most efficient paths users should take to meet with various customers in person.

According to DiVittorio, the spring release of MapAnything includes the Guide product, which allows users to plan multiple days of their schedule in advance. This addition will be particularly useful to retail sellers of consumer packaged goods who have to visit a given number of stores over a several-week period. "MapAnything will now be able to take data from Salesforce and combine it with location data and traffic data to come up with a set of routes over that period," allowing reps to see as many customers as they can while optimizing their routes for efficiency.

MapAnything's Live offering includes reporting capabilities for customers using the Live IoT and telematics solution. Users can build map layers that change based on the most recent device transmissions, a useful feature for field service and maintenance organizations as they attempt to respond quickly to outages on connected devices.

DiVittorio says that MapAnything is working on a set of APIs that will allow developers to build custom applications. "There are so many different use cases that involve maps—for Salesforce customers, especially—that we can't possibly have an app for every one of them," he says. Developers can take advantage of MapAnything's geocoding and telematics capabilities to track moving vehicles, for instance. He describes the possibility of enabling buses or shuttles to notify a CRM system when they enter a designated geographic boundary, thus triggering a set of preset workflow activities. Leveraging this, companies can automate the process of texting a customer to let them know that they will be arriving within a certain time frame, for instance.

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