Living the American Dream: Gurtam hosted the second partner conference in LA

Didn’t make it to California? For you, we collected the keynotes of the conference taking place the day before Mobile World Congress Americas. The insights will be helpful for your business even if you operate outside the Americas.

Gurtam team speaking

This year, the number of participants doubled compared to the previous year. Over 80 industry specialists visited us to discuss telematics in the context of the USA market. 

Sergei Leuchanka, the Managing Director in the Americas, started off the event with the intriguing news.

First of all, we launched the new datacenter in Washington, D.C. for local partners. The ambitious project took two years to be put into action. The details on unit migration for existing clients are coming soon, while the new clients in the region will be allocated to the USA servers from the start.

Second, Sergei presented the data of a major study by First Analysis agency conducted for three years and involving small and medium integrators from the North America.

• Telematics market grows, and becomes a great ecosystem for local businesses. Thus, all companies reported the increase in revenues compared to the previous year. While the third of respondents raised earnings by 50%. 
• In 2017, the integrators grew due to migration of assets from competitors’ tracking systems, while 2018 made the growth factor less significant. It’s determined by the expansion of target audience: many companies turn their attention to smaller fleets. 
• First Analysis agency also named the major criteria for the end-user to choose an integrator. In 2018, it’s still software functionality. The importance of the factor is constantly growing, while pricing no more matters that much. 
• 61% of respondents reported unchanged fees per unit compared to 2017.

Third, Sergei awarded two companies ranking in Wialon TOP 50 Global – the rating for the most rapidly developing Gurtam partners. Again, let’s congratulate Oigo Telematics and Direct Communication Solutions who didn’t make it to Minsk, but made it to LA!

Anna Demina and Liana Shatova from the US Business Development spoke about the evolution of Wialon system for the past year. Crossword-like presentation brought gamification to the conference. The partners were guessing “What do good partners ask for?” (new features) or “Where white label model is implemented most frequently” (mobile apps). Some were even saying that the presentation could become a great alternative to the New York Times Sunday crossword.

See some of the most beneficial features for the American market:

• Updated CMS Dashboard for the manager to quickly understand how Wialon is used in every hierarchical level; 
• Calculator in reports to sum up, subtract, divide, and multiply any numeric values in all tables; 
• Security tab in User Settings where you activate two-factor authentication and notifications about account blocking; 
• Tracker battery life indicator in the monitoring panel; 
• Weather map layers.

Sergey Leuchanka was followed by his colleagues. Ranjan Kaushal and Anthony Franklin shared some secrets about sales in GPS tracking. Anastasiya Eroho reviewed marketing channels for customer acquisition. Oleg Zharkovsky described the inner workings of Gurtam technical support and showed how to implement the model in the integrator’s business.

Partners speaking

Wialon community members also shared a great deal of experience. Orlando Monagas from Golden M decided to go the extra mile after becoming the best speaker in Telematics 2018 in Minsk. Again, he presented Goffice solution comprising four apps in a single interface: 

• Mfence – a handy app designed to create units and geofences in bulk; 
• Signaly – a tool to migrate units from other systems to Wialon; 
• GCC – a true control center for event-based monitoring; 
• Instora – a hardware installer’s assistant with the option to create units from a dashboard, hardware and SIM cards stock control, and installation orders assignment. 

Miguel Samano from Dogo Informatique joined Orlando a bit later. Their new development called TRM System consists of three components. 

• T1 Shipping allowing to track long-distance trips and manage the first stages of logistics process; 
• T2 Delivery designed to monitor the whole delivery process; 
• IoT Internet of Things to monitor how all your equipment works.

Then the mic goes to David Seijo from Assured Tracking who develop ELD-compliance solutions for the USA and Canada. They’ve been in the business for 5 years already which makes David an expert sharing his views on the major market trends:

• Lack of workforce. Truck drivers work and earn less due to stricter regulations, so the companies lose employees. 
• Lack of vehicles. The economy growth intensively, as well as cargo carriage volume. Unfortunately, truck production rate can’t fully satisfy the demand. 
• Cargo transportation rates increase due to the reasons above. 
• Truck drivers who go solo in the business are in ideal conditions. 
• The number of small trucking companies is growing. 

Wialon-based HOS/ELD solution by Assured Tracking is designed to control idling and driving times of such truck drivers. 

All the presentations are already available on my.gurtam.com. 

Panel discussions made the conference interactive. Howen and Streamax discussed massively popular video telematics, while Queclink and Sierra Wireless proceeded with the talks on general telematics hardware. 

The final flourish added Anthony Weed from SouthWinds GPS and Tommy Edge from Mobile Fleet Solutions. The partners discussed why they’ve chosen Wialon among hundreds of other tracking solutions, and how they sell the system to their clients. The audience joined the discussion to highlight other Wialon benefits: 

• The number of hardware types supported; 
• API and SDK; 
• Extended functionality. 

In the end, Cool Awards Ceremony made the conference more sincere and emotional. For instance, we named Assured Tracking “The ELD Prophet” who predicted the importance of ELD solutions several years before the FMCSA mandate implementation. “The Fast and the Furious” award went to Power Direct Marketing who were the first register for the conference in LA. CTTMX became our personal “Christopher Columbus” who discovered the USA for Gurtam, i.e. became the first partner in the region. 

The conference was over, but we anticipated MWCA 2018 where we exhibited at the famous megabooth with 10 more companies joining efforts to make our participation memorable. But that’s a different story.