Comment: Four ways to grow your commercial fleet management

What precautions should fleet management providers take to ensure the success of their commercial fleet management programme? Andy Greig, vice president, business development and strategic partnerships at Aeris, highlights the four key areas to consider.

As the global fleet management sector continues to grow, fleet management service providers are increasingly forced to manage the competing priorities of improving platform scalability, while reducing infrastructure support costs, and delivering a wide range of new features.

Choosing between these priorities inevitably results in delaying technology migrations or slowing the deployment of new products.

Partnering with an existing IoT platform provider is one option to shift key engineering resources to the launch of new services while still achieving your technology goals.

1. Don’t drain your resources supporting elements of your commercial fleet management programme where you will not see a good return.

Partner with a technology provider that enables the freeing up of valuable internal resources for advanced application development by delivering a platform to support the elements that are common across all fleet management services. Leveraging a technology partner can eliminate the need to apply your resources across all domains; boosting efficiencies and reducing operating costs by up to 50%. Simply put, competition in the fleet industry is centered around advanced applications such as driver behavior, video monitoring, etc. Ingesting and managing data, lifecycle processes, platform monitoring and security are the common platform capabilities that are all expected to work seamlessly. To win new customers fleet providers should put their resources where they will see the most return, and find a partner to support the rest.

2. Increase the speed to market of new application development

By utilising a cloud native platform based on micro services with a library of pre-built applications your engineering team will be able to reduce the time it takes to launch new applications by up to 70%. A micro services architecture provides the logical separation of platform components removing the need to update entire systems, and making the launch of new services frictionless when compared with the monolithic architectures of the early platforms.

A selection of pre-built base level applications that are required to support the advanced driver behavior, video and AI/ML applications demanded by customers today will reduce the development requirements and enable prioritisation of the applications that win new customers.

3. Maximise the scalability of the public clouds with a cloud native platform

In order to simultaneously control operating costs while building in the flexibility to scale to meet the dramatic growth in connected fleets, CTO’s need to take full advantage of the cutting-edge managed container technologies available with the major cloud providers. Simply migrating legacy technology to the cloud isn’t enough. Rapid deployment in new markets, with new customers, and new solutions, all while adapting to evolving data sovereignty rules requires extreme flexibility. Cloud native technologies such as Kubernetes that allow for rapid deployment of new containers supporting individual customers, or new market requirements are a critical asset for fleet providers competing on a global stage.

4. Leverage the technology model that best suits your business

SaaS and software licensing models both have their place in the world and can be advantageous depending on your capability and desire to manage a public cloud environment. Evaluating your short- and long-term resource allocation strategy, along with having a good understanding of the complexities of the public cloud fee structures is required to evaluate whether it is more efficient to utilise a SaaS provider or to host third party software in your cloud environment. It is also possible, whether you are migrating to the cloud or considering options to improve the efficiency of your current architecture, to create near term benefits by working with a SaaS solution provider for a limited duration before transitioning that relationship to a license model and taking the additional capabilities in-house.