Dominikus Hierl, CEO, Telit Automotive Solutions explains the reasons why this company has joined the ERTICO Partnership. In this interview, Mr Hierl reflects upon Telit’s contribution to ITS development, and presents its new automotive focused-business unit.
What has motivated you to join the ERTICO Partnership?
As a leader in machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and the Internet of Things, Telit naturally has a long standing interest in the automotive segment. Our technology is central to the success of projects like eCall. As such, we have been involved with ERTICO since 2003, and are pleased to partner with ERTICO both in the development and adoption of the standard, and in pilot projects. As the automotive segment continues to drive M2M adoption, significantly outpacing other verticals, Telit will continue to partner with ERTICO for the benefit of automakers, emergency response personnel and, most importantly, drivers around the world.
The motto of your company is “The Internet of Things Made Plug & Play”. What does it mean exactly?
For twelve years, Telit has been working to achieve this vision of simplicity for M2M. While much of the history of M2M is marked by complexity, custom purpose-built solutions and multivendor engagements, our goal is to simplify the process of adopting wireless M2M technology in order to accelerate the broad business, personal and public benefits it promises. To that end, we have expanded our footprint across the value chain to provide a single source solution to help our customers reduce costs, speed their time to market and mitigate the risk associated with such projects.
Telit defines itself as an enabler of machine-to-machine communication. Based on this, what is its role in the development and deployment of ITS?
As a provider of the technology underlying much of the connected devices across a variety of industries, Telit technology can be found inside cars, trucks and trains, as well as infrastructure monitoring equipment – even digital signs. With the addition of m2mAIR Mobile and Cloud services in the past eighteen months – we are not only assisting in the wireless transmission of data, but also in the applications that make sense of that information. This powerful combination of hardware, software and services form the backbone of these intelligent transport systems.
What can telematics systems do to improve transportation? Any examples?
Telematics systems at their core track vehicle location, operability, speed and more. That information, leveraged by transportation authorities, can be used for all sorts of traffic management, emergency response and more. eCall and similar emergency response regulations are fairly well know, but the capabilities of the technology extend into other areas of transportation management. A client of ours, for example, is using Telit technology to monitor and remotely control traffic lights in Sao Paolo – one of the world’s most congested cities for traffic. As a result of this technology, city officials are able to adjust light timings on the fly to reduce congestion and improve traffic flow.
What is on your pipeline?
With automotive and telematics together being a significant focus for Telit, we are always looking for ways to improve our offerings to these markets. Of course, we don’t make ITS systems ourselves – but we do enable our customers to make them, and improve them. We are particularly excited about our new automotive focused-business unit which was formed from our acquisition of the Automotive Telematics On-board Platform unit of NXP Semiconductors. With that acquisition, which closed in April, we added a significant amount of engineering expertise focused on the automotive market. They have already commercialized two highly-integrated products designed to serve the growing needs of auto OEMs. Stay tuned as we continue to look into ways to make intelligent transportation systems more plug and play with new innovation in hardware, software and services.
