On the heels of Apple buying WifiSLAM for $20 million to improve its indoor geolocation capabilities comes another piece of M&A in the space: Tibco Software, the enterprise software company, has bought Maporama Solutions, a French geolocation company, to help expand its big data offerings with location information. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Tibco says that it will be using Maporama’s technology to complement its Spotfire data analytics platform, providing more detailed results incorporating location into the mix. Spotfire’s current customers include AT&T, French bank BNP Paribas, Chevron and Kraft. A lot of its business rests around the ability to collect, track and analyse data in manufacturing and other business processes.
Adding location into the mix, to provide extra datapoints especially for customers who use the Spotfire platform in wider data gathering analysis, makes sense. With people increasingly interacting with enterprise platforms on the move using smartphones and tablets, the location element of those interactions becomes more significant.
“By combining Maporama’s digital mapping and geospatial capabilities with Spotfire’s market-leading analytics and data discovery platform, we will increase the value we provide to our customers, enabling them to solve new location-based business problems and make more informed decisions,” said Lars Bauerle, VP Spotfire Product Strategy, in a statement. “With 80% of business data having a location component, wide global adoption of mobile devices, and an increasing need for real-time information, enterprises are seizing new opportunities around customer loyalty, transportation, and supply chain efficiency. We are excited about these powerful geospatial capabilities and look forward to providing enhanced enterprise-class solutions to our customers.”
Publicly-traded Tibco, which has around 4,000 enterprise customers, has made some $229 million in acquisitions since Crunchbase started tracking them in 2008. The most recent before today had been LogLogic for $130 million in April 2012.
Maporama meanwhile has been around since 2000 and appears to have been bootstrapped. It has dozens of clients in Europe in a number of enterprise verticals including FedEx, Avis, Swarovski and and IKEA. This deal will give it a bigger platform to take its solutions global.