Pitney Bowes has become one of the first companies to add APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to its services to IBM's new Platform-as-a-Service offering called BlueMix.

Stamford, Connecticut-based Pitney Bowes provides a wide range of technology products and services to companies. The PaaS relationship with IBM, however, is focused on its location intelligence technology.

The technology analyzes and visualizes vast amounts of user location data and can be used for a variety of purposes, focused primarily on analyzing spacial data to derive business intelligence.

Possible use cases include making underwriting decisions by insurers, analyzing network coverage by telcos or doing targeted promotions by retailers based on location data.

Developers using BlueMix will be able to add these capabilities to their applications through Pitney Bowes' APIs. BlueMix is currently in beta.

Roger Pilc, chief innovation officer at Pitney Bowes, said, “Companies need tools and expertise to manage and integrate APIs, leverage location intelligence and customer data and then seamlessly extend their services to reach their customers via the cloud and mobile devices.”

IBM announced the BlueMix project in February at its Pulse conference in Las Vegas. With the PaaS initiative, it is going primarily after enterprise developers.

The offering is built on Cloud Foundry, an open source PaaS project led by EMC and VMware's Pivotal, which has also taken an aim at the enterprise developer market.

Big Blue said the service supports multiple programming languages and includes DevOps (developer operations) services as well as native mobility features.