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Geotab to acquire BSM Technologies

May 7, 2019
Transaction would provide government and private fleets a broadened selection of services for maximizing productivity, efficiency, and safety.

Geotab, a dealer in IoT and connected transportation, has signed an arrangement agreement to acquire BSM Technologies (BSM). BSM provides telematics and asset management solutions to more than 165,000 vehicles across government and private fleets in Canada and the United States. The completion of this transaction would add to the over 1.5 million fleet telematics subscribers utilizing Geotab globally.

Over the past 20 years, BSM has developed extensive experience and customer relationships in the government sector, enabling municipalities and states/provinces to optimize and manage their winter road maintenance fleets.

”BSM had previously standardized on using the Geotab platform as their base and then created a competitive advantage by building new products on top of our technology,” said Neil Cawse, Geotab CEO. “An example of this is winter ops - support for data and the management of snow plows and spreaders. This technology is key for our resellers to be able to win government business.”

By adopting the Geotab platform, BSM’s customers in government as well as other verticals including construction, service and rail, will not only benefit from Geotab’s leading engineering expertise and award-winning focus on security, scalability and reliability but will also gain access to solutions for enhanced visibility into vehicle performance, driver habits, accident detection and more.

Placing security at the forefront of its innovations, Geotab announced earlier this year that the cryptographic module in the company’s GO vehicle tracking device received FIPS 140-2 validation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

“BSM’s activity in the government space coupled with Geotab’s proven success and commitment to security and scalability will work in tandem to dramatically accelerate Geotab’s presence across North America including in the electric vehicle space, which is an increasingly important emerging market,” added Cawse. "We are excited about what BSM will do to strengthen our ecosystem and believe that the resultant platform enhancements will benefit our customers around the globe."

Driving Geotab’s partner network forward

Geotab provides customers with access to an open-platform solution that enables fleets to customize and scale their telematics implementation to meet their business needs. This approach has allowed the company to align with strategic partners that provide customizable solutions to help improve productivity, fuel efficiency, driver safety, and more.

Through this transaction, BSM customers will also benefit from Geotab’s partner ecosystem. BSM will contribute some of its product and services development in asset tracking, winter ops, third-party integration and off-road equipment tracking to the Geotab Marketplace, Geotab’s extensive online solutions center for managing mobile assets and workers.

“Following the announcement of our expanded partnership with Geotab in late 2018, it became clear that BSM’s growing analytics and optimization capabilities combined with Geotab’s best in class telematics solution results in an enhanced product offering to fleet management customers.  As part of the Geotab team we will be able to offer these capabilities across all of Geotab’s partner network,” said Louis De Jong, president and CEO of BSM. “The combination of BSM and Geotab is a great outcome for all of BSM’s stakeholders.”

About the Author

Fleet Owner Staff

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Kevin Jones, Editorial Director, Commercial Vehicle Group

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