Panintelligence and Thunderforest
Panintelligence is a BI vendor that provides data reporting tools to clients around the globe. As part of their suite, they offer clients geographic visualisations of their data using Thunderforest maps.
We talked to development manager Neil Musgrove.
We give clients the opportunity to visualise their geographical data as part of our BI offering. Thunderforest provides us with great looking map tiles, as well as multiple API keys, so we’re able to track usage by each deployment of our software.
What led Panintelligence to choose Thunderforest?
One of my colleagues did a detailed analysis of the online mapping market. Value for money is always something we’re concerned with, as well as map styling. Thunderforest was the mapping solution that fitted our needs the best.
We use a Javascript library called Leaflet. Google Maps don’t provide tiles directly – you have to use their API. We were using a tile provider before, and didn’t want to do any major rework but the Thunderforest tiles were a drop-in replacement.
We considered creating and hosting our own tiles but it sounded like too much effort. I’d rather have a service that handles tile generation and hosting.
I always think a company should focus on their core USP, which is where they can provide most value and utilise specialist third-party services. That’s what we say to our customers!
How are you using Thunderforest at the moment?
A lot of our customers are other development companies, which integrate our suite of tools with their own to provide BI. We have clients from industries such as Fintech, Education and Healthcare.
We wanted unique API keys per deployment so we can monitor usage and take action if any deployments were using up an especially large amount of quota.
I raised a support query to ask if we could have multiple API keys for clients: it wasn’t self-service but support were very accommodating and were able to help setup what we needed and it’s a valuable feature to us.
We made a visual check of various map styles and decided that the Atlas style was the best. We weren’t looking for anything specialised: just clean and pretty. In future, we might look to provide our customers with other map styles as well.
Why does Panintelligence continue to use Thunderforest?
I like that Thunderforest is a smaller company, with friendly customer support. You’re not hit by a wall of process. Cost is also competitive and we like the map styles.
It’s chugging away nicely, with no issues. We don’t have to spend time worrying about it. We’re very happy with it.
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