Pitney Bowes Inc. has announced its Pitney Bowes Group 1Software and Pitney Bowes MapInfo business units, acquiredseparately, will become a single software company effectiveimmediately, and the businesses will merge operations over the nextseveral months.

Mike Hickey, currently president of Pitney Bowes MapInfo, willbecome president of the combined entity, which is called PitneyBowes Software. Chris Baker, who has served as president of Group 1during two years of strong growth, will be transitioning into abroader innovation role within Pitney Bowes after leading Group 1through a transformation that created a structure for sustainedcustomer and shareholder value.

"Merging the businesses is both a natural evolution and anexciting step forward for Pitney Bowes," says Leslie Abi-Karam,executive vice president and president, document messagingtechnologies. "We have become a large, multifaceted, and powerfulsoftware company in the past three years, and by combining ourseparate acquisitions into a single entity, we can deliver evenmore effective solutions to the marketplace."

Pitney Bowes MapInfo specializes in location intelligencesoftware, data, and services. Group 1 Software is a leader inenterprise data quality and data integration software, with aspecial focus on standardizing and enhancing customer addressinformation. Group 1 Software also has industry-leading documentcomposition tools.

Abi-Karam cites three significant opportunities that open up asa result of the new business combination. "First, we have a hugeglobal opportunity to bring together our expertise in locationintelligence and address verification to become the mostcomprehensive and accurate provider of consumer andbusiness-to-business data for marketing or business transactions.Second, our ability to integrate customer data with psychographicand demographic data creates a broad suite of marketing anddecision-making tools for industry verticals, such as insurance,retail, and government, where location information is critical.Finally, we will create a single organization that can work withour marketing services business to enhance our current offerings tomarketing executives at companies of all sizes."

Hickey is a 12-year veteran of Pitney Bowes MapInfo. He servedas the company's chief operating officer from 2002 to 2007 and wasnamed president earlier this year.

"This step will benefit both companies and their customers byproviding them the best of what both MapInfo and Group 1 Softwarehave to offer," says Hickey. "The two companies have formed a closeworking relationship, and this announcement is a very positive movefor our respective customers and employees."