Four years ago Telekom Austria created a separate organization to focus on M2M. What had started as an opportunistic business focused on meeting customers’ needs by using existing products and customizing them as required had grown to justify standing on its own two feet.
Now the portfolio covers a lot of bases. Many industries can benefit from the use of M2M technology and the list continues to grow. The industries that Telekom Austria currently focuses on are automotive, consumer electronics, healthcare, security, industrial/smart metering, logistics/transportation, retail and energy/utilities. The way they approach these markets is all about a total solution. It offers an end-to-end value chain if desired or modular solutions that integrate with your own solutions, all based on a cloud platform with a web portal management interface.
In order to help explain how this works, let’s look at a couple of the current offers they provide. Fleet telematics is a pretty standard M2M offer in today’s world. Telekom Austria addresses the needs of this category through various paperwork verification and asset protection functionalities. In the first category the automated driver’s log documents the services provided while capturing the location, routes traveled, working times, fuel tank levels and driver identification. Fuel theft is a common problem in this category as the price of fuel continues to increase. The system not only monitors fuel usage and refuelling statistics, but there also is a real-time alarm for potential fuel theft that can notify the fleet managers via the Telekom Austria web portal.
Add the asset tracking portfolio to the fleet management solution and the tracking goes to a deeper level. You can manage shared resources such as heavy equipment and farm equipment. You can manage temperature controlled units to ensure perishable items are safeguarded properly. And my personal favorite, you can track and prove SLA promises. The example shown is the snowplow. How many times have you wondered when the roads are finally going to be plowed and treated? On the provider side, you can track exactly when and how often this occurs to show proper road maintenance is occurring. Now if only someone would create a portal so a citizen would know this information and plan their bad weather travel accordingly.
Telematics crosses the spectrum of vehicles and there’s a lot of valuable data that can be obtained from these systems. The market is only beginning in the insurance space where companies are starting to offer special rates for opt-in customers in response for participating in telematics monitoring so the insurance companies can learn more about how drivers drive and the resulting implications to auto safety, performance and maintenance. But what about all the other data that could be gathered?
I recently attended a Connected Car conference where as the keynote, BMW spoke about selling the experience of the connected car, not just the functionality. Our smartphones and web browsers learn more about where we go online and what we like/dislike and present appropriate content and offers to us. Why shouldn’t our cars, car dealers and auto makers do the same?
In my chat with Telekom Austria we discussed this vision. How might analytics gained through telematics influence our vehicles in the future? Really focusing on selling the experience vs. the vehicle at the highest level is the topic. But also think about managing your travel to/from given locations based on monitored traffic patterns that can recommend a small time shift to expedite your trip. For example, go 15 minutes earlier/later based on historic traffic performance and you’ll have a different travel experience. Geomarketing related to events, shopping options and reducing emissions are some other topics.
These are all great visions for the future and we need telecom operators to step up to help the automakers speak this language. This is their core competency and there is a great opportunity here to open new doors for the customer experience of driving and options that can generate revenue on the provider side. These are great concepts and hopefully they start to be realities soon.
