LAS VEGAS — After some “very critical learnings” in 2019, Omnitracs has big plans for growth and innovation in 2020, CEO Ray Greer said during a wide-ranging keynote address to open the company’s annual user conference.
“There is a very natural tension between supporting and maintaining and sustaining old technology and innovating with new. And somewhere, as an industry, we have to find this balance between the two,” Greer told a crowd of customers, company partners and industry experts gathered for Omnitracs Outlook 2020.
A big task for the company, one of the largest suppliers of electronic logging devices and telematics systems, in the coming year is how to solve the same old problems in new ways. “That's where we're focused: making sure that as we implement new features, functions, capabilities. We're using the modern technology to do that, and not staying stuck in this old way,” Greer said.
Omnitracs expanded its technology offerings with various initiatives in 2019, beginning with the acquisition of Blue Dot Solutions. The new offering, Omnitracs Drive, offers a streamlined mobile user interface aimed at improving efficiency and workflow for drivers and dispatchers. The acquisition, along with a strategic partnership with Red Hat, led to the initial phase of Omnitracs One, a cloud-driven technology platform that launched in December. Greer said there are already 15,000 vehicles running on the platform.
"In total in 2019, we shipped over 120,000 devices to various vehicles throughout North America,” Greer said. “It's a staggering number. And part of it is a byproduct of expansion. But it's also a byproduct of customers beginning to upgrade their technology in advance of 3g" sunsetting.
Greer also acknowledged Omnitracs’ ELD connectivity problems late last year that forced some customers with MCP devices to resort to paper logs. The failure was caused by a “GPS rollover event” that happens every 19.7 years. Software that is not coded to anticipate the rollover can get confused by its internal calendar.
“Those confusions exists because this technology has been deployed to solve more than one problem — not just electronic logging,” Greer said. “But I'm proud of how this organization responded to it. It was a lot of sleepless nights, a tremendous amount of stress and we got through it.”
Omnitracs hired PwC to do a root-cause analysis of the failure. “It was a very conscious decision to say, let's use a third-party because we have third-party people involved in something they or we didn't know about,” Greer said. “Let's go try and find out how this could possibly happen. So they conducted a very thorough investigation.”
“In the process of doing this, what we learned was it was clearly embedded systems failure” Greer continued. “There was a known rollover event in April of 2019. But unbeknownst anybody, Qualcomm had basically embedded within the chips a six month extension to that rollover period. Now, I would tell you, from my point of view, from Omnitracs point of view, even though we tested in April and it was successful, we are going to be testing every month over the next 20 years to know where these things happen.”
Qualcomm previously owned the Omnitracs unit but sold it to a private equity firm during the last decade.
The ELD issues gave Greer an epiphany: The trucking industry is so dependent on expensive hardware that once companies buy it and install it, they want to keep it forever.
“Imagine if your laptop computer were 10 years old, and how effective you would be,” Greer said. “But for some reason, this industry is willing to keep the driver on a 10-year-old device. It doesn't make sense to me and it's counter to this idea of accelerating innovation... And our answer to this is, we need to bring the hardware costs down to a price point that allows it to be refreshed.”
Among the ways to keep devices fresher is accelerating Omnitracs’ OEM-embedded strategy. So each time a company buys a new truck, it is also refreshing the telematics hardware.
“So we know, we've got some internal things that we're very fixated on and PwC's been great at helping us with, but we also know that we have to pivot strategically to help the industry migrate in points you'd never thought about before.”
Greer also highlighted other strategic investments:
- Omnitracs hired Red Hat to complement its $70 million annual R&D budget to accelerate its cloud-native platform and open-source culture.
- It accelerated customer growth onto the "Omnitracs One" platform, with more than 15,000 vehicles now on the platform.
- It processes 59 billion data transactions annually, including industry-leading location intelligence on 6.7 million pick-up and drop-off points around the country, allowing for faster pick-up and delivery times.
- The company developed several new applications as part of the Omnitracs One platform, with Omnitracs Tax Manager being the first to launch.
- Omnitracs also announced a partnership with SkyBitz Inc., a leader in IoT telematics solutions, to offer customers more advanced fleet and trailer-tracking solutions.
