MapAnything Launches First API Services, Enables Developers to Enhance Enterprise Applications with Location-Awareness

By STS News Desk On Aug 2, 2018

Access to Advanced Distance Matrix Helps Developers Solve Complex Routing and Scheduling Calculations with Accuracy and Speed

MapAnything, the Leader in Location-of-Things software for business, today announced that the company will roll out several API services to provide businesses access to the MapAnything Routing and Optimization engine and other components of the award-winning MapAnything Location-of-Things Platform. One of the first services, announced today and immediately available as a REST API, is the Distance Matrix that calculates optimal shortest path and true travel time for a combination of locations and destinations. This new service is designed to enhance any enterprise application that requires complex TSP (Traveling Salesman Problems) or VRP (Vehicle Routing Problem) calculations to deliver customer value, so companies can improve customer service while streamlining sales and service costs.

“When you look at the market for location and routing services, most of the innovation is going into autonomous vehicles and consumer apps, but we believe innovation is desperately needed in the BtoB sectors as well,” said John Stewart, CEO and co-founder of MapAnything. “Until now, the legacy technology and API services used by transportation, logistics and field service applications was designed for on-premise hardware before the age of cloud computing. By offering our advanced Routing and Optimization Engine, and open access to the engine with our new API service, we’re going to revolutionize routing and scheduling for those industries. We’re taking a fresh approach to solving an age-old problem, leveraging a decade of experience building location-based applications for the enterprise.”

Unlike other offerings in the market, MapAnything took a clean sheet approach, building its routing capabilities from the ground up, and creating a dedicated team of some of the industry’s most experienced PhDs in decision science and optimization, headed up by Chris Groer, the creator of the Open-source VRPH. The team’s unmatched experience, combined with the newly announced API-first design, takes advantage of modern cloud computing architecture and optimization methods.

The result is the first commercially available distance matrix that offers up to nine distinct traffic windows while still computing a solution 100’s of times faster than existing solutions in the market. The MapAnything Distance Matrix also offers the capability to solve up to 7,500 x 7,500 or 56,250,000 shortest path calculations in a single API request, problems that are an order of magnitude larger than any other commercially available solution.

ServiceTitan, a leader in mobile, cloud-based software for the home services industry, was looking for a solution to help it scale its dispatching capabilities as the company adds new clients and users at a breakneck pace.

“MapAnything has greatly simplified our Smart Dispatch feature by providing us a drive-time estimation API scalable enough to produce estimates for millions of pairs of points per second,” said Alex Yakunin, CTO of ServiceTitan, the number one provider of software for home services businesses. “This data, as well as predicted job value and other features, is crucial for our Smart Dispatch engine to come up with efficient dispatch plans. MapAnything’s ability to handle such a technically challenging problem at scale has not only simplified and shortened our go-to-market, but presents the most cost-effective solution for us.”