STAMFORD, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Pitney Bowes Inc. (NYSE:PBI), a global technology company that provides innovative products and solutions to power commerce, is accelerating innovation and value for its SMB clients through its new Small Business Partner Program, which includes Google G Suite, Yext (NYSE: YEXT), Acquisio, DocuSign and Nimble CRM. This partner ecosystem allows partners to gain access to Pitney Bowes clients and offer their innovative digital marketing and productivity applications available through the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud.
Shipping and mailing related applications are available on the newly released SendPro C-Series office sending solution via the Google Android operating system. To scale an increased breadth of partner applications over time, a Pitney Bowes App Store, leveraging Google Cloud’s Orbitera technology, will be released within the coming year. This App Store will provide small and medium business customers access to applications beyond shipping and mailing that will further enhance their productivity and digital initiatives.
Pitney Bowes is leveraging the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud to deliver these Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. The combination of applications on the newly released SendPro C-Series device and those offered through the Pitney Bowes App Store will help small and medium businesses grow by reducing the complexity and cost of shipping and mailing. It will help them more effectively market and communicate with their customers by leveraging the applications made available through the Pitney Bowes App Store. The Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud leverages Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform to enable open integrations and rapid new service creation by Pitney Bowes and third party developers.
“The new Small Business Partner Program from Pitney Bowes represents another major milestone in our transformative journey,” said Mark Shearer, executive vice president and president, Pitney Bowes Global SMB Solutions. “Creating this partner ecosystem gives our more than 1 million small and medium businesses and ecommerce clients the opportunity to use a broad range of cloud and mobile enabled business applications to better reach their clients, manage their operations more effectively and ultimately grow their businesses. Our digital platform creates an entirely new client experience and offers the flexibility to quickly add more partner applications and bring even greater value to our small business client base in the near future.”
“Businesses everywhere are harnessing the power of the cloud and APIs to deliver rich, connected experiences for their customers,” said Chet Kapoor, vice president of Google’s Apigee group. “Pitney Bowes is an excellent example of a company that is rapidly transforming and redefining a traditional industry with modern, data-driven, solutions. We are proud that the Apigee API platform has been enabling Pitney Bowes' digital transformation for many years -- and that they are now leveraging other Google Cloud technologies to further enhance their offerings for small-and-medium business customers.”
Pitney Bowes Small Business Partner Program
Last year, Pitney Bowes launched the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud, a commerce enabler that provides access to solutions, analytics and APIs across the full commerce continuum to help clients identify customers, locate opportunities, enable communications, power shipping from anywhere to everywhere, and manage payments. Adding these new partner applications creates an entirely new and improved client experience, while offering tremendous value to businesses looking to more effectively connect with clients. The Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud provides access to many new Partner Program applications and useful integrations between Pitney Bowes and partner offerings including:
- Google G Suite (SaaS Productivity Suite)- a cloud-based productivity suite that helps teams communicate, collaborate and get things done from anywhere and on any device. Pitney Bowes clients will be able to subscribe to the Google G-Suite directly from their Pitney Bowes’ Your Account webpage.
- Yext (Digital Marketing) – Yext puts business on the map. The Yext Knowledge Engine™ lets companies manage their digital knowledge in the cloud and sync it to over 100 maps, apps, search engines, GPS systems, and social networks in the PowerListings® Network, including Google, Apple, Facebook, Bing, and Yahoo. Yext helps businesses around the globe facilitate face-to-face and digital interactions that boost brand awareness, drive foot traffic, and increase sales.
"Yext's mission is to put every business in control of its digital knowledge everywhere," said Jonathan Cherins, executive vice president, Partnerships, Yext. "We're proud to partner with Pitney Bowes to help companies of every size stay competitive and drive more business."
- Promote by Acquisio (Digital Marketing) – an advertising solution that helps businesses get new customers on Google AdWords with zero expertise needed. Promote uses machine learning and automation to create tailored ads for 180+ business categories instantly, plus provides optimization, on-the-go text notifications for incoming leads and tracking of all recorded incoming calls from ads.
“We’re proud to partner with Pitney Bowes, a company as dedicated to the success of small businesses as Acquisio. Local businesses simply do not have the time or expertise to grow their business with online advertising. We are solving that problem with a dead simple, yet sophisticated tool that automates everything for them - so they don’t have to pay agency fees and still get the best possible campaign performance available on the market,” said Marc Poirier, chief executive officer, Acquisio.
- Nimble CRM (Digital Sales and Marketing) - Nimble is a simple social sales and marketing CRM that helps you grow your business. Nimble works seamlessly with Microsoft Office 365 and Google GSuite to enable companies to intelligently nurture relationships across email and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIN and everywhere they work.
“As social media and the cloud continue to revolutionize the way people buy, businesses are scrambling to find new ways to manage relationships at scale,” said Jon Ferrara, chief executive officer, Nimble Inc. “We are delighted to partner with Pitney Bowes and help ecommerce customers cultivate relationships in an authentic way by replacing spreadsheets, impersonal email blasts and time-consuming Google searches with auto-generated social business insights on people and companies.”
- DocuSign (eSignature) – DocuSign is the global eSignature and digital transaction management (DTM) leader, with over 300,000 customers and more than 200 million users around the world. The company’s solutions enable people to sign, send and manage documents anytime, anywhere, on any device, with confidence, and they replace printing, faxing, scanning and overnighting documents with the easiest, fastest, most trusted way to make every approval and decision digital.
“We are excited to join the Small Business Partner Program from Pitney Bowes Partner to help SMBs in their digital transformation journey. Our leadership in eSignatures combined with Pitney Bowes’ leadership in customer communication will help those SMBs optimize their operations and grow their business,” said Mark Register, senior vice president: business development and channels, DocuSign.
Over time, Pitney Bowes SMB clients will be able to leverage their Pitney Bowes Purchase Power payments solutions for a broader set of Pitney Bowes and third party services. This will provide tremendous convenience, help with cash flow, and loyalty program benefits.
SendPro C-Series
Last week, Pitney Bowes introduced the SendPro C-Series, which transforms the traditional postage meter into an all-in-one office sending solution. It is a multi-carrier platform that enables offices of all sizes to select the ideal sending option for every parcel, letter and flat they send, while also providing full tracking and delivering savings across carriers.
The C-Series is based on the mobile Android operating system and the new Pitney Bowes Small Business Partner Program, and will allow Pitney Bowes to deliver a broad range of new web and android applications directly and rapidly to the device.
At launch, the C-Series featured three partner applications in addition to its core shipping and mailing applications:
- USPS – access popular USPS.com tools; calculate shipping prices, find a Post Office, look up a Zip Code, schedule a next-day pickup, request USPS to hold your mail, access Informed Delivery to track packages and digitally preview incoming mail.
- Universal Tracking with Google Maps - a package tracking tool that will map your UPS, FedEx, and other major carriers’ package's progress with Google Maps.
- Mailing and Shipping Advisory Tool - provides a simple overview of all the popular services and terms provided by carriers. This allows customers to quickly learn terminology and services to make informed decisions on selecting services for their mailing and shipping needs.
The SendPro C-Series leverages Smartlink Internet of Things (IoT) technology to improve ease of use, enable new services and provide visibility and control over postage and shipping spend. AutoInk enables just in time ink deliveries at significant cost savings. AutoPostage refills and AutoRate updates ensure the system is always accurate, up to date and ready to use. The Commerce Cloud Insights dashboard provides analytics on mailing and shipping spend, trends and savings opportunities.
To enable optimized software delivery on the newly released SendPro C-Series, Pitney Bowes will be utilizing VMware Workspace ONE™ powered by VMware AirWatch® unified endpoint management (UEM) technology.
“Company leaders, particularly small business owners, do not have time to constantly worry about updating and securing the tools they use to run their business,” said Noah Wasmer, senior vice president, Mobile Products, End-User Computing, VMware. “By leveraging Workspace ONE, Pitney Bowes’ clients can benefit from a simple, over-the-air process when it comes to updating their SendPro C-Series software as well as advanced security features so data is protected on IoT devices.”
Today, we are also announcing a Global Hackathon open to millions of developers to create applications on the C-Series device platform. Pitney Bowes has partnered with Google Developer Group, and other major technology developer communities to source developers that will create next generation applications for small and mid-sized businesses. This global developer community will collaborate on the C-Series platform to accelerate the innovation that will drive outcomes for small and mid-sized businesses.
Continuous Innovation
The Pitney Bowes App Store will continue to grow over time and create more value for small and medium businesses and ecommerce clients by delivering solutions with speed and agility that help solve real business challenges. The Pitney Bowes App Store will feature even more relevant applications over the course of the coming year. This may also include the ability to purchase applications as well as offering single sign on to allow small businesses a means to access many applications in a simpler way.
Shipping will drive the next phase of our transformation. Last week we announced our intention to acquire Newgistics, an Austin, Texas-based provider of parcel delivery, returns, fulfillment and digital commerce solutions for retailers and ecommerce brands selling in the U.S. The SendPro C-Series family of products and shipping solutions, combined with our acquisition of Newgistics strengthens our presence in the shipping and sending market.
For the last 100 years, Pitney Bowes has taken the complexity out of the mail process through innovation, technology and services. Today, the Company continues to expand its expertise by combining the strength of physical mail and shipping with digital experiences in mailing and shipping, Presort and Global Ecommerce to simplify the challenges and complexity of the growing parcel market.
For more information, go to www.pb.com.
About Pitney Bowes
Pitney Bowes (NYSE:PBI) is a global technology company powering billions of transactions – physical and digital – in the connected and borderless world of commerce. Clients around the world, including 90 percent of the Fortune 500, rely on products, solutions, services and data from Pitney Bowes in the areas of customer information management, location intelligence, customer engagement, shipping, mailing, and global ecommerce. And with the innovative Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud, clients can access the broad range of Pitney Bowes solutions, analytics, and APIs to drive commerce. For additional information visit Pitney Bowes, the Craftsmen of Commerce, at www.pitneybowes.com.
