Teletrac Navman is a global leader in GPS tracking and fleet management solutions. The software-as-a-service company tracks and manages more than 500,000 vehicles and assets for more than 40,000 customers around the world. While the company's headquarters is located in Illinois, the all-important software development for Teletrac Navman's core product takes place in its Pleasanton office in Hacienda.

"We provide a combination of hardware and software," explains Tariq Ahmed, Director of Software Engineering at Teletrac Navman. "The hardware component is a little black box, almost like the flight recorder in a plane. The black box goes inside your vehicle, and it transmits all sorts of telemetry data to us. So we know where the position of the vehicle is, how fast it is moving, the direction it is going in. But we also capture all sorts of additional information, such as fuel usage and accelerometer events." Among other things, the company's technology can tell how safe a driver is, including things like speeding, harsh braking, and cornering, and going through stop signs.

In addition to the information that Teletrac Navman gathers with its proprietary hardware and software system, it also taps into the information available from individual vehicles.

"Most people don't realize it but a car is literally a computer on four wheels - or however many wheels it has," says Ahmed. "There's an enormous amount of data that's being transmitted over a vehicle's computer network. "We intercept all of that information, and then house it in our cloud application." Company customers can then access that information to locate and move vehicles or resolve other issues.

There is both an operational and an analytical component to the company's service, says Ahmed. A fleet owner has lots of questions: How much fuel am I using? How much fuel am I wasting? How many miles a day is the average vehicle driving? Do I have enough vehicles or do I have too many vehicles? These questions can be answered with Teletrac Navman's fleet and asset management technology, which helps customers reduce the risk of managing vehicles and drivers. Their customers have access to many different types of data, including performance reports and safety analysis.

While many of the company's customers are traditional truck fleets, they have other types as well. One Teletrac Navman customer is a large public education department that uses the technology to track the department's massive fleet of school buses.

"They use our tech to make sure they are accurately picking up and dropping off children with special needs," says Ahmed. "Each driver has the planned route and then the actual route. In the use case of children with special needs, drivers log as each child comes on the bus and leaves the bus, to make sure all children are accounted for. It's a huge operation."

According to the company, its technology has helped customers decrease fleet maintenance events by 12%, reduce fuel consumption by 30%, increase productivity and compliance savings by 30%, and reduce road violations and incidents by 20%. For more information about Teletrac Navman, visit www.teletracnavman.com.