About TheWebService
In the words of CEO & co-founder Guy Mucklow:
Our background
TheWebService is a sister brand to Postcode Anywhere,
a private company that Jamie Turner and I founded in 2000 to realise the potential of using web services for
managing data in a far more dynamic and proactive way than using traditional methods.
We started out by creating web services around the UK address database (known as the Postal Address File), to
enable businesses to capture address details quickly and accurately in their applications by just typing in a
postcode or partial address.
It's a well known technology in the UK where we are the leading player in the online data capture area. It's
the reason why we called ourselves Postcode Anywhere, because that's what zipcodes are known as in the UK.
As we've grown over the years, we've expanded the range of web services that we provide to include data capture,
cleaning and enhancing solutions using a range of well known data sources such as Dun and Bradstreet, Tele
Atlas, CACI and others. In addition we've also created some very sophisticated web services which answer
specific needs in areas such as route planning and optimization.
We're particularly proud of some of our services such as our international addressing and route planning and
optimisation and would encourage you to not only test them out for yourself, but speak to our developers either
directly or through our forum to share ideas or get into a deeper understanding of what they do. Many of these
web services are, in our view, unique in the market place and we think answer common business problems, simply.
We currently have over 7,000 customers around the world including many Fortune 500 businesses such as Citibank,
Heinz, Xerox and Honeywell providing many millions of transactions daily through our exceptionally resilient
and secure infrastructure.
Our success depends on our performance ? if we're not reliable then our customers will simply choose to go
elsewhere.
One of my favourite stories which sums up the exceptional power of data as a service and also illustrates the
potential of our infrastructure is an Australian call centre which use us to quickly capture Australian
addresses from a postcode, making 26,000 mile round trip requests from Sydney to our web servers and returning
the results to an application (Salesforce.com) which is hosted in San Francisco.
That's impressive in my view, particularly as the response takes less than 1/3rd second.
So what is TheWebService?
TheWebService is a new brand that we've launched which is aimed more at a more technical audience.
It's a brand which marks our transition from being a company that is best known in the UK for addresses and
reflects the fact that we offer a much wider portfolio of web services which continue to improve the whole
process of managing data throughout its lifecycle.
So why did we call it TheWebService? Well, in our view, web services are now recognized as a technology in
their own right, and whilst we've moved on from the general view that a web service is "any service relating
to the internet", it still confuses some.
Probably more importantly in our view is that international markets are currently opening up to the
possibilities of public and privately hosted data services and frankly we were getting a bit fed up telling
people at international trade shows that we were nothing to do with posting data as the name Postcode Anywhere
might suggest!
So TheWebService was born. It's got a long pedigree through Postcode Anywhere, but it comes with a big
difference.
It's designed to provide developers with a much easier access to public data web services backed by a pricing
model that is aimed to maximize flexibility of movement between different data sources whilst giving you
complete transparency on pricing.
It's also a completely new innovation which enables you to deploy and consume your own data through our web
service infrastructure using the MyTables range of web services.
What are MyTables and what's so new about them?
MyTables is a natural progression from some of the public data web services that we have now been providing
for over 8 years.
The idea was partly born out of an internal view that we could use our existing infrastructure and technologies
to give customers the power to control and manage their own data, backed by regular requests from customers
who would say to us "we have a small data set that's widely used, can you help us to provide a web service
around it so that we can manage, maintain and deploy it more efficiently?"
However, MyTables is not just about giving you total control over your data, it's about simplifying the
management and maintenance whilst also giving you the ability to integrate it with pretty much any application
that you care to think of through our automatic code generation capabilities.
We think that you'll find MyTables invaluable and are keen to encourage you to try it as well as to tell us
what you think.
Feel free to drop me a line with any comments.
Best
Guy Mucklow - CEO/co. founder
TheWebService
