Pitney Bowes Inc. ruled the mailroom back when information sharing required an envelope and a trip through the postal service, but its signature metering machines are now gathering dust as marketing, mail and commerce take place on virtual platforms. Determined not to join its postage meters as a relic of the past, the snail mail pioneer is reinventing itself to meet the demands of the digital economy.

“Transforming digitally is what we’re all about right now, moving more into mobile and web-based software solutions for our customers,” said Brett Nelson (pictured), software as a service platform architect at Pitney Bowes. “We [have] modernized all of our offerings.”

Nelson spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Sumo Logic Illuminate event in San Francisco. They discussed the role data analytics company Sumo Logic Inc. is playing in Pitney Bowes’ digital transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

The evolution of the Commerce Cloud

Looking back, Pitney Bowes has a history of innovation. In the 1950s and ’60s, its meters and sorters brought automation to mail rooms across the world, boosting productivity and reducing costs. In 1968, the company created the first retail-use bar code equipment, and “virtual” postage by phone services became available in 1978.

While the company’s most important applications are still based around shipping, it has evolved to offer global ecommerce fulfillment services, multi-carrier tracking, intelligent geo-location technology, and built-in customer relations management solutions along with today’s digital presort services and business mail and shipping.

Two years ago, Pitney Bowes launched the Commerce Cloud as a virtual hub where clients could access this new generation of offerings. But incident tracking and resolution proved to be a challenge.

“When we started making big strides in the digital transformation, we had all these disparate products and disparate APIs crossing so many systems. And in order to have a decent time to resolution when you have an issue, you need to track all of those things in one place,” Nelson explained.

Cloud-native, machine data analytics platform Sumo Logic provided the solution. “All of our applications that we bring through the Commerce Cloud now are enabled on Sumo Logic for aggregated logging,” Nelson said, explaining how after implementing Sumo Logic, Pitney Bowes completely rewrote its logging standard. “When you’re a single application, that’s a completely different use case than when your success depends upon a web of other API calls that you don’t control.”

Ramping up use cases for Sumo Logic is in Pitney Bowes’ roadmap for 2019, according to Nelson. “What we want to do is use [Sumo Logic] smarter and use it in a more directed fashion. We’re going to enhance on the security side, and we’re also going to be using analytics going forward more than we are today,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Sumo Logic Illuminate event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Sumo Logic Illuminate. Neither Sumo Logic Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE