TELOGIS
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New entrant to UK market US-based Telogis may be the largest telematics firm you’ve never heard of – but it’s coming your way. Telogis only entered the UK market this year, and European general manager Sergio Barata describes the firm as a ‘locationbased services provider’ with 200 employees. The firm’s main product, called Progression, is described as a ‘work order management platform’, and Barata says: “Our core markets are large enterprises with a focus on services.” However, this could change, because the firm has entered a global OEM agreement with Ford to operate the manufacturer’s Crewchief telematics platform, which will be introduced to Europe before long.
Telogis was founded in 2001, and originally made its own ‘black box’ telematics hardware, along with a Software as a Service (SaaS) application for customers. Barata says: “We’d engineered the technology from the ground up,” but admits that this was almost too early for SaaS. “There has been a wider trend towards SaaS since 2006”. But he is convinced that it was always the right approach. “A lot of our competitors got bogged down in client-server systems,” he says, having to keep their software running and updated on a wide variety of systems. The SaaS approach, with applications running on remote servers and accessed by the customer via the web, makes maintenance and updating much easier. The system evidently works well for Telogis, which has doubled its revenue year-on-year since 2007.
Telogis’s SaaS pricing is based on a per-asset, per-month model, usually on a threeor five-year contract. Barata says this helps when working out the return on investment for a telematics system: “It’s very tangible. Very quickly I can see if I’m getting a real-time benefit.” He also points out that the Telogis system includes almost all the elements an operator might need, from order creation to scheduling and turn-by-turn routeing with live traffic updates, as well as real-time and post-analysis reporting.