Irish council upgrades to enable access to Ordnance Survey Maps and future proof itself for next five years

Windsor, Berks, 24 January 2012 – Pitney Bowes Software (PBS) – a global leader in customer data, analytics, communication software and services -  today announced that South Tipperary County Council (STCC) in Ireland has upgraded to Pitney Bowes MapInfo Professional® v11.0 - the most cost-effective way to provide desktop mapping to its users.

The new system, supplied through one of PBS’ Irish partners, Troyteq, goes live this month and  means that council teams will now have the latest desktop mapping application and direct access to OSi MapGenie, a new service from the Ordnance Survey that provides online access to the most complete and highest quality map data of Ireland that is available.

The service gives the council national mapping coverage and enables it to map local infrastructure that extends beyond county lines. In the short term this cuts down administration as STCC no longer has to obtain this information from neighbouring counties. More significantly, in the longer term the council is likely to drive significant cost efficiencies by no longer having to maintain a local version of its mapping data.

Eddie Meegan of STCC believes that this is a huge step in the right direction. ‘We have lots of different agencies in the Irish system and they are now all looking to share information with each other. The only sensible way to do this is over the web and with MapInfo Professional v11.0 we’re future-proofing ourselves for the next five years.’

Meegan explains, ‘Having reviewed our options upgrading to MapInfo Professional v11.0 proved to be the most cost effective way of providing desktop mapping to our 60 users.’

Before upgrading the Council did a detailed user analysis which identified about 10 high-end data creators, 20 analysts and report writers, and around 30 occasional users, classified as ‘dippers’. STCC considered an open source solution but this was impractical because switching to a new system would have been disruptive, the low cost did not offset the high cost of training, and there was neither back-up nor access to OSi MapGenie.

Within the council MapInfo Professional is used across a number of departments for a variety of different purposes:

• IT integrates a vast amount of data from other databases  to create logical datasets for users

• The environment section draws in information from a range of sources such as the Environmental Protection Agency to create policy documents. While planning uses the application for land zoning, thematic mapping and for cross referencing with Excel spreadsheets. 

• Key maintenance areas such as water services use the application for integrating data and large format mapping; and the asset management team uses the application for analysis of accidents and planning maintenance.

From a user perspective, MapInfo V11.0 offers some significant enhancements.  Meegan says he is finding something new each day and has been particularly impressed by:

• A more dynamic zoom function

• Faster and more precise digitisation

• Additional query functionality

• Ability to control layer shading

• More functional browser and map windows.

Steve Deaville, Managing Director, UK and ROI, Pitney Bowes Software, said “Data is used every day across public and private sector organisations to make critical strategic decisions. “MapInfo Professional v11.0 significantly simplifies data management saving time, money and resources and we are delighted that so many departments within South Tipperary County Council will benefit from the enhancements in this latest release”.

MapInfo Professional® is a powerful Microsoft® Windows®-based mapping and geographic analysis application from the experts in location intelligence. Designed to easily visualise the relationships between data and geography, MapInfo Professional helps business analysts, planners, GIS professionals – even non-GIS users – gain new insights into their markets, share information-rich maps and graphs and improve strategic decision-making.