Today, I am very pleased to officially welcome SmartDrive into the Omnitracs family. Our teams have been chomping at the bit to start working on how we integrate our technologies, and now that we are one company we can get going!
Our vision by combining these two companies and our strategy moving forward is to realize the possibilities and efficiencies of convergence in the transportation and distribution industries, and I want to use this blog to talk a little bit more about what that means and why it is so important to Omnitracs and to our overall industry.
What is convergence?
The best example of convergence that we all understand is the smartphone. We used to have separate devices for listening to music, taking photographs, streaming video, running work applications, and, yes, for making phone calls. Our phones are now credit cards, timers, personal trainers, pedometers, cookbooks, matchmakers, storefronts … the list goes on. In short, convergence is the bringing together of services that were once traditionally separate industries, entities, or data pipes.
In transportation technology, we’ve not yet found our “smartphone”
In the back office, in the cab, and on the vehicle, it’s a complex world. We have multiple, parallel systems and sensors that create complexity and add friction. Wouldn’t it be great, for example, if we could converge all the devices in the cab and dramatically streamline the driver experience, while also reducing the costs of outfitting a vehicle?
Perhaps even more important than the reduction in the number of physical devices we can achieve with convergence is the streamlining of data. Before your phone became your timepiece, there was a notion of “synchronizing watches”—establishing one “truth” for what time it is. Today, we’re far more likely to have the same answer for “time” as our colleagues because there are fewer data sources feeding our phones. That’s not the case with all the data collected and transmitted from vehicles: is your telematics device correct on the distance driven, or the time spent idling or arrival and departure times? Algorithms are different because the data is pulled from different sources and the accuracy of GPS chips varies. Every application and device we use gathers and calculates information differently.
By bringing together SmartDrive’s and Omnitracs’ technologies and leveraging our collective wealth of technical and industry expertise, we are confident that we can solve this industry challenge of data and device convergence to bring our customers a more accurate, streamlined and cost-effective experience.
What’s next?
Today, we are taking a moment to welcome our new team members into the Omnitracs family. Tomorrow begins our future, and we will continue to innovate, develop and collaborate to transform our industry.