Before founding his own firm, Castle Consulting, Castle was regional director of the Roulac Group at Deloitte & Touche. Prior to that, Castle was VP at Comarc Systems. In addition to editing several books about GIS, Castle writes a column for Business Geographics magazine.

Castle is charged with helping the year-old company launch its real-time, Internet-based site selection, acquisition and management solution for retailers and hoteliers. "We're not developers or brokers," says Castle. "We are automating the site-approval process, the overall intent being to shorten the time it takes to find, approve and secure a site by about 30%."

The Vectiv application is known as the Strategic Real Estate Solution. SRES integrates data from a wide range of sources, and puts it all together in a customized platform for individual clients. According to Castle, clients will be able to view spatial data, broker listings, government and legal data, demographic information and local amenities, all on a single site. The company hopes this information will allow decision-makers to get a better overall picture of a potential location, in less time than with traditional methods. The target audience for the software application is big-box retailers and hotels.