Geospatial business systems company Aspire Solutions has concluded a partnership with MapIT, a supplier of digital mapping data in Southern Africa, enabling it to develop rapid spatial solutions to business problems.
“Businesses don’t want systems for their own sake, they want to fix problems,” says Aspire Solutions director Mike Steyn. “Having quick access to MapIT’s base map data enables us to identify and build spatially aware solutions that deliver rapid return on investment.”
“There’s no transaction that doesn’t happen somewhere in physical space,” says MapIT Managing Director Etienne Louw. “More and more people are seeing the advantages of understanding their activities from a location-aware point of view.”
In terms of the agreement, MapIT will supply Aspire Solutions with map data and an application programming interface (API) that enables it to build custom solutions based on that data.
“The map data is expensive to maintain and supply,” says Louw. Indeed, map data collection is so expensive that there are only global suppliers of this data – one of which, TomTom, is a part owner with Avusa of MapIT. “Our mission now is to take this data that we’ve developed and make it available to the business world.”
“MapIT holds great data sets for South Africa and the rest of Africa,” confirms Aspire’s Steyn. “Now they’re providing that as a data layer we can use as the foundation for business solutions, enabling us to be very agile and quick in developing solutions.”
Because the data layer is made available on a pay-per-use basis, adds Steyn, “we can very confidently approach major corporates as well as smaller firms, and offer them flexible pricing that’s proportional to the value they get. The cost of data is no longer an obstacle to becoming a spatially aware business.”
Staff Writer
