Jon Winslow is Global Portfolio Director for the Location Intelligence Business at Pitney Bowes Business Insight. The Pitney Bowes Insights 2010 Conference is May 12-14 in Miami.

LBx The Insights 2010 conference is rapidly approaching. You must be very excited. What are your expectations for this year's conference?  How have they changed from last year or previous years?

Winslow  My expectations are always high for a variety of reasons. The best day of the year is the day you get to be with hundreds of your best customers. As someone with a product management background, I value the direct input I receive from customers immensely. I look forward to the opportunity to speak directly with dozens of our customers about the challenges they face and their innovative uses of our technology.

One exciting change for us is that our customer base is much larger and more diverse today than it was a few years ago. I have been with Pitney Bowes Business Insights for 13 years – I started work at MapInfo in 1997 – so I have seen many changes. Our acquisition by Pitney Bowes and the subsequent merger with Group 1 software has resulted in an influx of new customers, colleagues and new ideas.

As a company, we have grown to include customers that come from both operational and analytical sides of the business. We handle issues around direct mail and online customer communications, and which involve critical location-based problems. Learning with our customers how these things relate to one another is a thrilling part of what we do. For example, working with organizations that need to deliver different content, or need to modify their customer communications based on geography – this is what makes our business exciting.

LBx Will you be focusing on anything in particular at this year’s conference? And can we expect any new announcements?

Winslow  During Insights, we will have three forums geared towards our customers’ unique needs. There will be a location intelligence forum, which will center on mapping, data, geocoding and predictive analytics. There will also be postal and customer communication management tracks during the conference.

The location intelligence forum will include LI case studies, hands-on training and techniques as well as a hands-on look at the newest version of MapInfo Professional.

We will formally announce MapInfo Professional v10.5, the newest version of our flagship application for business and mapping analysis. The newest version boosts several new features including the ability to publish maps in the cloud, providing enhanced access to the tools and information necessary to make critical business decisions.

Customers will also have the opportunity to learn more about several product offerings during the conference as well as the chance to learn more about the innovative ways their peers are using Pitney Bowes Business Insight’s solutions. During the conference, the winners of the fifth annual Meridian Awards will be announced. The Meridian Awards honors customers who are driving business innovation with new, dynamic uses of location and communication intelligence solutions.

LBx This is obviously a user conference, but who exactly are your customers, and specifically who within the organization are the users of your products and services?

Winslow  Our customers come from some of the largest commercial and public sector organizations in the United States and from around the world.  We expect to see people from Asia, Europe, Latin America, and, of course, the United States and Canada.

They represent a diverse variety of industries such as communications, financial services, the public sector, retail and utilities. We also have customers in the agriculture and mining fields.

The problems they solve with our solutions encompass a wide spectrum. Some are working on network planning, some are working on customer service or communications, and others are doing analysis around driving revenue or better meeting demand for products and services.

Most of the attendees are senior level people who are responsible for departments that analyze data, or that are in charge of managing large operations, such as mail centers. They participate in Insights to network with their peers and to learn from each other’s experiences. The conference also provides them with an opportunity to learn more about what PBBI is doing such as the changes and enhancements we are making to our solutions and our organizations. And some might come for a little fun – it is Miami, after all.

LBx Lastly, and most importantly, what do you want people to take away from the conference?

Winslow Our business is about making connections. We help our customers locate, connect and communicate with others in their daily business. If we can do something like that at our conference, face to face, instead of with the software that we deliver to people, that would be great.

I hope our customers have the opportunity to connect and communicate with one another and with us at the conference. In the process, I hope that they will learn new things and that they return to work eager to put into practices some of the new skills and techniques they heard about at Insights.

I also want to make sure that our customers understand how energetic and excited we are here at PBBI. We feel lucky that we have the opportunity to work with great customers and create solutions that solve critical problems, for both the public sector and the commercial world. For example, it feels good to know that our jobs enable organizations in the federal government to deliver benefits to people in need. We get to help commercial organizations put stores in the right location so that they can be successful. It feels good to know that we are helping businesses decrease their mailing costs by optimizing their operations, fine-tuning their message and moving the right content for the right customer to the web.

We are also excited because of the new solutions we are bringing to market. Many of them are being delivered in new ways, particularly online using a Software as a Service model. As a result, many of our current and new customers will be able to do a better job controlling costs and will be able to take better advantage of our solutions in a much quicker manner than ever before. That is exciting for us and exciting to our customers as well.

By the time the conference is over, I know I will be energized by what I learned. I will also be excited by the potential to build new solutions based on feedback I receive from customers. And I will be able to see even more opportunity for connecting location-based data and analysis to critical customer problems.

I hope that our customers walk away feeling the same thing.