STAMFORD, Conn. - More than 2,000 developers from major technology firms have submitted 65 new technology solutions created during the Pitney Bowes Global Hackathon which took place September 29 through October 10, 2017. Pitney Bowes (NYSE:PBI) is a global technology company that provides innovative products and solutions to power commerce.

According to research and advisory firm Gartner, “Hackathons are a great way to jump-start an API program...A recent Gartner survey showed that 35% of enterprises with aggressive innovation strategies use hackathons to pursue hot initiatives.”*

The Global Hackathon invited developers to collaborate and build applications and solutions for more than one million Pitney Bowes clients as they identify and locate customers, communicate with them, collect payments and ship merchandise. The Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud is the open platform where more than 2,000 developers went to work on solutions in many areas including mailing and shipping, global ecommerce, and payments.

The Global Hackathon brought together the Google Developers Community with innovators from Pitney Bowes and dozens of other developer communities. The 65 applications and solutions were developed for the next generation Pitney Bowes SendPro C-Series, a complete solution that handles all business sending needs via Android, Google’s open-source mobile operating system.

“The Pitney Bowes Global Hackathon is the best example of our company’s integration across our mailing and shipping, software, data and global ecommerce businesses. Developers from the best technology firms in the world are collaborating around all of our physical and digital solutions on our open platform, the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud,” said Marc Lautenbach, President and CEO of Pitney Bowes. “Because we created our sending solution with the Android operating system, we’ll be able to quickly bring to market a breadth of applications and solutions from Pitney Bowes and from our technology partners.”

The 65 solutions brought forward during the Hackathon are designed to remove the complexities of global commerce including Document Security, Duties and Taxes, and Address Management.

*Gartner: Top 10 Things CIOs Need to Know About APIs and the API Economy, Paolo Malinverno, Kristin R. Moyer, Mark O’Neill, Mike Gilpin, Published 25 January 2017 ID G00318859