Steve Isaac • Aug 22, 2019

Forrester Includes CARTO Among Location Intelligence Platform Providers In Now Tech Report

We are proud to announce our inclusion in Forrester’s exclusive Now Tech: Location Intelligence Technologies, Q3 2019 report. The report, which details many of the applications of Location Intelligence, and the competitive advantage that it provides to modern businesses, serves as a guide for leaders looking to invest in spatial technologies to take their companies to the next level.

“Insights-driven businesses gain competitive advantage by leveraging data and analytics to intelligently inform decisions, actions, and experiences … By 2021 they will generate $1.8 trillion in combined annual revenues. Location intelligence (LI) is core to their success.”

In their report, Forrester defines Location Intelligence as “The practice of collecting and managing customer location data, enriching it with other data sources, and analyzing it for context to inform optimized actions, decisions, and customer experiences.” And for businesses wondering whether to leverage this new technology, Forrester notes three ways that LI providers can change a business:

• Making sense of big spatial and customer location data
• Democratizing advanced spatial insights
• Scaling intelligent business decisions, actions, and experiences with location

CARTO: A Location Intelligence Platform Provider in a Diverse Field

In assessing companies in the Location Intelligence sector, Forrester breaks down the industry into five distinct functionality segments:

• Location Intelligence data product providers
• Location Intelligence execution technologies
• GIS/spatial analytics specialists
• Enterprise location data management
• Location Intelligence platforms

While the first four categorizations reflect providers that specialize in specific capabilities, the Location Intelligence platforms segment is distinct in that it meets the widest array of functionality needs, delivering ‘moderate’ to ‘high’ functionality across 14 of 15 capabilities (the next highest segment boasts only 7 out of 15). According to Forrester, “Platforms merge much of the advanced functionality found within the other four market segments.” This allows clients to create seamless data-to-insight workflows.

Of the 34 providers mentioned in the report, CARTO is one of only 8 included as a Location Intelligence platform.

Forrester notes that vendors in this segment include large incumbents, such as Google, ESRI, and Microsoft, that have built, acquired, and then sought to merge multiple components of the LI stack. This can often lead to disjointed user experiences with components that don’t always play well with one another. CARTO’s platform, on the other hand, doesn’t suffer from the same issues of being ‘cobbled together.’ Instead our platform holistically provides data products, spatial analysis, and a complete development framework with visualization libraries and APIs under one roof.

We are proud to be included in Forrester’s latest Location Intelligence report, and will continue to strive towards being the leading Location Intelligence platform where our customers can solve spatial problems with the best data and analysis.

About the author

Content Marketing Manager at CARTO.

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