geoVue's MarketVue Portal: Quick Take on the Web-based Application

Just before the holidays, I was given a demonstration of geoVue's new marketVue Portal by geoVue's Michael Kesselman, executive vice president of Corporate Development.The company is planning to "unveil" the product at the National Retail Federation meeting in mid-January, but according to Kesselman, the product is already in use at several client locations.

The marketVue Portal is a tool to centrally manage and distribute geographic data and decision making tools online, primarily oriented at large organizations that manage franchise operations.Said Kesselman, "Basically, marketVue Portal is a way to bring together all the people involved in branch operations."

The application is set up so that people with different roles in branch operations access only those parts of the application that apply to them.For example, real estate brokers access the "Brokers" section to provide information about available properties.Franchisees access screens that describe what territories are available and what the potential is within those territories.The iPlan screens address the needs of the corporate research staff.And so on.geoVuer, shown below, is designed to be an executive dashboard that provides overviews of various management-level data such as the effectiveness of a specific marketing campaign.

Figure 1.Lease expiration by state.(Click for larger image)

iPlan, which according to Kesselman, has generated the most interest, includes what we might consider the beefier applications involving demand modeling to optimally configure a network within a market.

Figure 2.Using iPlan to look at a market network configuration.(Click for larger image)

At the end of the day, marketVue Portal is really a re-packaging of existing capabilities into a different format, with the idea of making them easier to access and within a corporate environment."There are a lot of enterprise implementations our competitors are doing," said Kesselman."We try to take the Web and leverage it for what it's best at ï¿1⁄2" we don't want to recreate the desktop."