Melissa Data Corp, a developer of data quality and address management solutions, has announced that its Address Check Web Service is now available on Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket for Microsoft's Data Quality Services (or any client that embeds the API). Address Check provides real-time address verification and standardization for U.S. and Canadian addresses. Users, from both small and large businesses, can easily add Address Check to their applications to save money on postage and reduce undeliverable mail and shipments by cleaning up inaccurate, incomplete, or undeliverable addresses at point of entry.
"It is basically on demand. As they need a service they can use Microsoft's Data Quality Services to link up to the marketplace and pick and choose the types of services almost on an à la carte type of menu," Greg Brown, director of marketing for Melissa Data, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
The Address Check service validates address data against the most current reference data from the U.S. Postal Service and Canada Post. The programming logic used by Address Check is CASS Certified by the USPS - ensuring that the highest quality of data is returned. The service includes DPV, LACSLink, SuiteLink, EWS (Early Warning System), and exclusive AddressPlus to add missing apartment numbers for increased deliverability.
With the new integration with Microsoft's platform, there is no development needed on the end user's part, says Brown. "This opens it up to whole realm of data stewards that can take advantage of what was once either web services or local APIs that needed to be integrated into an application."
In addition to providing address verification, appending missing ZIP + 4s, delivery points, and identifying addresses vacant 90 days or more, the Address Check service also returns suggestions (with rankings) for invalid or ambiguous addresses and will geocode addresses with accurate latitude/longitude coordinates. The service also includes intelligent entity recognition algorithms that can analyze name and address information from free form or un-fielded text data and assign the contents to the correct output property.
To request a free 30-day trial of Address Check, or for more information, visit http://www.melissadata.com/datamarket.