Telematics Los Angeles 2019: NA partners reunion

The featured guests, trends, analytics, "secret" content, worldwide Wialon use cases… All these things should immediately come to your mind if you try to recall Telematics Los Angeles 2019. What are the brightest moments of the Gurtam Partner conference that needed to be highlighted? Keep reading, please.

Telematics Los Angeles is our traditional event we hold one day before MWC Los Angeles, the major industry event for North, Central, and South America.

This time, the conference gathered partners and our MWC LA IoT zone co-exhibitors. Also, we invited 2 researchers working in telematics markets as keynote speakers and brought 8 Gurtam experts to share their proficiency. Thus, over 70 people totally involved in telematics and IoT visited the conference. 

The conference started with a welcoming speech by Sergei Leuchanka, Gurtam Managing Director (Americas). He thanked all the participants, announced the Gurtam representatives, named the invited experts, and enumerated the co-exhibiting technological partners. 

Then, Sergei gave a speech dedicated to the Wialon partner policy and shared future plans in this regard. In particular, Gurtam is going to continue promoting healthy relationships and collaboration among partners, and develop the partner community.

Following Segrei, Liana Shatova and Ekaterina Kim, our Partner Success Managers, grabbed the microphone and held the Jeopardy game with the questions reflecting the one-year Wialon overview.

Soren Hallbert, Wialon Technical Consultant from Gurtam, presented some secret content dedicated to the Wialon’s YouTube Tutorials, and highlighted basic tutorials available now. Soren emphasized the importance of video content and revealed another secret related to the personal touch project. In particular, Soren gave step-by-step instructions on creating any element on the platform. This approach was chosen so that users can follow the instructions, practice, and apply their knowledge in practice.

After a coffee break, a featured speaker Clem Driscoll, C.J. Driscoll & Associate Founder and President, brought to the attention of the audience the overview of connected fleets and commercial telematics market.

In his speech, he emphasized that since 2015, the industry had grown up to 60%, and the local fleet market demonstrated a 10-12% growth annually. Also, he elaborated on the requirements of horizontal and vertical markets. Thus, while horizontal markets are looking for low price, ease of installation, ease of use, and customer support, vertical markets are interested in rather expensive video-based solutions. 

We at Gurtam also see this market development, and our presence in the Americas went from 51 thousand units in 2015 to 350 thousand units in 2019, which is not 60% but 600% growth.

Clem Driscoll, C.J. Driscoll & Associate Founder and President

Anastasiya Eroho, Head of Gurtam Marketing Department, presented the Gurtam community highlights. 

Later, the audience again dug into the analytics thanks to David Gearhart, Equity Research Analyst from First Analysis and his North America fleet telematics survey. 

 The most valuable insights highlighted:

• the majority of the survey participants (86%) focus on small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), operating fewer than 500 vehicles;
• no respondent reported a decline in revenue over last year;
• the market penetration is ~30% with remaining significant greenfield opportunities;
• the functionality is factor #1 when customers select a vendor.

 The study covered 28 fleet telematics solution vendors, with 61% of participants from North America. The insightful performance of the second featured speaker ended up with a group photo and lunch. 

David Gearhart, Equity Research Analyst from First Analysis

After that, the Gurtam experts Soren Hallbert, Wialon Technical Consultant, and Ranjan Kaushal, Partners Success Manager, highlighted the Wialon worldwide use cases. There were stories from pharmaceuticals transportation in Sri Lanka to prisoner tracking in Mexico – challenging but successful all the while. In their presentation, Soren and Ranjan showed a diversity of Wialon cases of implementation in completely different industries. At the same time, the key to success in each case is very individual. Thus, someone applied API and SDK and astonished by their custom developments, someone extensively used WiaTag, and someone demonstrated their mastery of Wialon implementation.

Please note that you can find more cases in our use cases library, and even more projects are outlined on the Gurtam blog.

After being informed about the present market situation, the audience got to learn what the future is bearing via Sam Colley, Pod Group CEO, and Robert Martin, Suntech CEO. In their speeches, they presented their thoughts on the upcoming trends in the telematics world.

 After a coffee break, Sam Teng from Streamax touched a topic of video telematics, while Wil Hurst, VP of Sales in Xirgo Technologies and Laura Barner, SpeedGauge Director of Partners, presented their custom IoT solutions.

A round of performances ended up with informative speeches of Mikita Kaplunski from Technoton and Mike Lawless from Direct Communication Solutions. 

Each presentation generated great interest with multiple questions announced – and we couldn’t fit all the questions into the timing, so the discussion moved to the networking part of the conference. Unfortunately, here, we can’t tell you about each talk in detail, but feel free to visit my.gurtam.com and download the presentations. Also, more photos are available on the Gurtam Facebook album, and more videos – on the Gurtam YouTube channel.

We are pleased to thank each partner who attended the conference. Please know that your participation encourages community growth and development. See you at the upcoming events!

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