Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Colin Sutherland, Co-Founder of Geotab (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you net this out for me? Who are your customers?

Colin Sutherland: 50% of our sales are to the wireless carrier industry. In North America, the top seven wireless carriers themselves represent our technology. We consider them to be our customers because we’re selling to them. They, in turn, sell to end users. We also sell to customers like the fleet management industry that manage or lease vehicles on behalf of customers.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about the fleet management industry. Specifically, what ways are you adding value? Walk us through a fleet management company workflow. Where are you impacting their work flow? Where are you adding value?

Colin Sutherland: The number one piece of data that drives a lot of your decision making is the odometer on a vehicle. It sounds pretty silly, but being able to go and actually record the odometer in a vehicle from every vehicle that you have and have that collected in a central cloud-based server every day is incredibly valuable. You can know what type of predictive maintenance you need to do based on mileage. You need to know how many miles a vehicle is being driven in order to do what’s called asset utilisation. Should I buy more of this specific type of car? Maybe, we should be offering that driver a hybrid vehicle because he drives so many miles. We need to get better fuel economy.

Studying mileage everyday actually drives a lot of decision making about what type of vehicle a fleet should be buying, what type of length of lease we should be having, and how to maintain that vehicle. Our technology can record the odometer from all of these vehicles and we can deliver it back to the fleet every single day. It can drive their business. Up until now, it has been a manual process of the driver having to, sometimes, phone it in. It’s very inaccurate. A single piece of data can actually drive literally thousands of dollars of savings for businesses.

Sramana Mitra: Any other core value propositions or use cases where you are doing something that dramatically impacts the workflow and the efficiency of your customers?

Colin Sutherland: What’s driving businesses today hasn’t so much to do with efficiency than what it has to do with environmental health and safety. Most businesses are very interested in improving the safe performance of their drivers behind the wheel. We measure things like braking, collisions, and towing incidents in order to ensure that drivers behind the wheel are driving safely.

The benefit of training and coaching drivers in the vehicle for driving safely is that it actually drives fuel efficiency. Businesses are actually measuring two things. They’re measuring their carbon output because they’re burning less fuel while reducing claims and safety cost. That’s a very interesting trend. 70% of the businesses that we work with today are very focused on both aspects – driving safely and how that impacts their fuel reduction.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Colin Sutherland, Co-Founder of Geotab
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