Tele Atlas heads south of the border
Map data provider Tele Atlas today announced its acquisition of detailed source data covering Mexico’s highway and street network. According to the company, it will begin rolling out Mexico-based geographic services in three to six months.
The expansion of its Latin America coverage addresses a growing demand for maps that seamlessly facilitate commercial traffic throughout the supply chain of North America, stated Mike Gerling, Tele Atlas COO of the Americas.
Map coverage of Mexico will be offered as an added service, and is expected to be a major source of revenue growth for the company. “Revenue will increase because more users using the data and current users paying for more coverage. I anticipate a larger percentage of (new) revenue will come to helping the existing customer base.”
Tele Atlas has learned from its acquisition of Canadian data that its customers seek “holistic” coverage.
“We have dozens of customers in North America who wanted to move south,” Jay Benson, Tele Atlas vp of business planning told FleetOwner. “Filling that hole should help fulfill a customer need. This data hasn’t been standardized across a common format—we’re trying to get it in a standard format.”
According to Tony Stroncheck— president of trucking software company Promiles, which is a Tele Atlas partner— Promile customers “are actively moving operations to Mexico and want the same type of tools, devices and technologies available to them in other markets.”
Tele Atlas’s decision to invest in the Mexico data was driven by the trucking industry’s adoption of routing systems and demand for extended coverage reaching a flash point.
“I think the people that are currently delivering and receiving goods are coming to rationalize fleet management systems,” Benson said. “The number of companies out there integrating fleet management and asset management systems is increasing much more rapidly than fleet traffic itself.”
Tele Atlas has also announced it will open an office in Mexico that will focus on sourcing and data validation.
For more information, go to www.teleatlas.com.
