By Thomas Wale, President at Unacast
In a world flooded with data, customers don’t need more signals, they need someone to help them interpret what those signals mean. They need guidance. They need partnership. The days of simply handing off a data dump and hoping for the best are long gone.
In the age of data abundance, the real value lies in how well you help others use it.
The advantage comes from the translation layer - how well that data is interpreted, contextualized, and turned into insight. Customers don’t want vendors. They want collaborators who can help them think better and act smarter.
The shift: why a “vendor” is no longer enough
Over the last five years, the role of location data providers has changed dramatically. Historically, a vendor (the soon-to-be old term) would deliver raw data and maybe provide some baseline documentation. The burden of making it useful—parsing, cleaning, integrating, analyzing—fell on the buyer. But today, that approach simply doesn’t scale.
Modern business decisions are too complex and too fast-moving to allow for months of integration cycles or trial-and-error modeling. Organizations need data partners who can help them identify the right questions, guide technical implementation, and stay engaged through evolving business needs.
Whether it’s site selection in retail, demand forecasting for supply chains, or zoning and footfall analysis in commercial real estate, the data needs context. It needs structure. It needs a human in the loop. And most of all—it needs a partner who understands the why behind the data.
Forget the “dump-and-run” model
Too many legacy data brokers still operate under the “dump-and-run” model. They hand over massive volumes of location data—gigabytes or even terabytes of raw device signals—and leave it to the customer to figure out what to do with it. No guidance. No enrichment. No support.
That model may have worked when data was novel. But today, it’s not only outdated—it’s dangerous.
Raw data without structure can lead to misinterpretation, wasted time, or flawed insights. And worse, it often creates risk, privacy gaps, inconsistent methodologies, or poorly understood metrics that customers use to make multi-million dollar decisions.
At Unacast, we believe this approach fails to deliver on the promise of location intelligence. That’s why we’ve invested heavily in building infrastructure that doesn’t just collect and deliver signals—it turns them into insights that work within our clients’ workflows.
What Strategic Partnership Really Looks Like
Being a strategic partner isn’t about hand-holding or overservicing. It’s about embedding real, functional expertise into the relationship—whether that’s technical guidance, product alignment, or business model evolution.
At Unacast, we aim to be an extension of our customers’ data, analytics, and strategy teams. That means:
- Helping our customers ask better questions before any data is licensed
- Supporting on delivery formats to meet internal analytics and data frameworks
- Aligning on KPIs and collaborating to ensure that what we’re delivering is not just usable, but impactful
This shows up in our team structure, too. Our sales organization operates more like consultants than closers. Our engineering and product teams are involved early to ensure what we build works in the real world. And our Client Success teams are measured not on ticket closure, but on outcomes achieved.
We’ve seen this approach pay off again and again. A great example of this partnership model is our work with Lake Nona, a master-planned smart city in Orlando, Florida. Lake Nona's development team sought to understand visitor origins, visit duration, and activity patterns to gain deeper insights into community engagement and movement trends. Unacast provided geofencing analysis of mobile device data across the community and Town Center, offering precise insights into visitor behavior.
“We found that visitors to Lake Nona were coming from a much wider area than we previously anticipated. We were able to use that precise catchment area in conversations with major retailers and to inform our overall strategy."
— Juan Santos, SVP Brand Experience, Tavistock Development Company
By providing these insights, Unacast helped Lake Nona refine its long-term strategic plan, ensuring the community's growth would align with the interests of its target markets. This collaboration exemplifies how strategic partnerships can drive meaningful outcomes.
The result wasn’t just a data feed. It was a strategic capability they didn’t have before.
The Future Belongs to Partners
Location data is no longer a niche tool—it’s foundational. It touches every decision from investment strategy to public safety to consumer experience. But it only creates value when it’s connected to real-world decisions.
That’s why the companies who will lead in this next wave of data intelligence won’t be the ones with the biggest datasets. They’ll be the ones who serve as true partners—bringing their customers closer to the decisions that matter most.
At Unacast, we’re building for that future. Because we believe data should drive action, not confusion. And partnership—not volume—is what unlocks real impact.
