Salesforce acquires MapAnything for its location-based intelligence products

Salesforce today revealed that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MapAnything — a Charlotte, North Carolina-based intelligence software and services provider — for an undisclosed amount. The announcement comes months after MapAnything’s latest funding round, which brought its total raised to nearly $84 million.

As TechCrunch notes, the buyout doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. MapAnything’s products have long been available through Salesforce’s AppExchange store, and the 10-year-old startup has been named both a Salesforce SI Partner and an ISV Premier Partner.

“With MapAnything, Salesforce will be uniquely positioned to extend the power of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud post-closing to deliver market-leading location-based intelligence solutions that improve field sales and service employee productivity and deliver customer success,” Salesforce wrote in a press release. “The addition of MapAnything to Salesforce will help the world’s leading brands accurately plan: how many people they need, where to put them, how to make them as productive as possible, how to track what’s being done in real time, and what they can learn to improve going forward. ”

MapAnything’s platform offers a routing and scheduling engine, integrated GPS tracking capabilities, and a location-based workflow layer that helps answer “complex spatial questions” and drive prompter customer service. At its most basic, it transforms database entries into waypoints. But it also enables geofencing triggers and other contextual hooks, along with sophisticated routing that takes into account distance, cost, and time in determining the best way to accomplish multiple navigational goals.

For example, MapAnything’s Salesforce, ServiceNow, and ServiceMax components allow sales managers to see customers and leads on a map-centric user interface and to sync in-the-field activities with a Foursquare-like check-in and check-out system. Fleet management companies, meanwhile, can use it to visualize vehicles’ geographic whereabouts and trigger work orders when drivers leave a defined geographical area.

MapAnything additionally offers APIs for computing the shortest distances and fastest travel times between locations and for managing last-mile logistical challenges and multi-day, multi-vehicle routing.

“The ability of B2B enterprises to derive value from location is a game-changer for organizations with large mobile workforces,” CEO and cofounder John Stewart told VentureBeat in an interview last November. “But historically, geographic intelligence has been limited to those with advanced analytics … experience. MapAnything is democratizing location data to accelerate the productivity of mobile workers and enable customer experiences that exceed expectations.”

MapAnything’s Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2,000 customers — which number nearly 1,900 — span financial, manufacturing, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries and include Lyft, Capital One, American Express, Proctor & Gamble, Airgas, Shaw, Inmar, and Mohawk, to name a few. The company employs more than 150 people worldwide.