After a few PowerPoint slides and a description of how the new ConnectedDriver app works, Jim Lowell plugged his smartphone into the projector on stage.
“I want to show you a demo,” said Lowell, chief software engineer for PeopleNet during the company’s 13th annual user conference, held Aug. 25-26 at the J.W. Marriott Desert Ridge Resort in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Live demoing a new product to a roomful of customers is risky, but it was too late to turn back. The audience was now looking at a supersized version of his phone screen.
In the real world, Lowell explained, the app on a driver’s phone would need to be joined to a truck operating with the in-cab PeopleNet platform. Once this validation was made, the driver could see live dispatch messages, hours of service status, and other real-time data in the mobile app.
Using a laptop PC with an Internet connection, he created a dispatch message by going into the PeopleNet Fleet Manager. This online management portal is what fleets use to communicate with their drivers, to view reports, and perform other functions.
“I’m going to send a dispatch to this truck and I want you to see how fast it is. Three, two, one, send,” said Lowell. Three seconds later, the dispatch message had already gone through PeopleNet’s cloud-based network and appeared in the app. “Everything is that fast. All the messages get there that fast. All of the dispatches get there that fast.”
The mobile app and the lightning-fast movement of data through the cloud were part of the much bigger announcement at the conference: a new ConnectedFleet Platform that connects people, equipment and devices to a “fully managed, cloud-based vehicle network” that resides in a public cloud instead of in PeopleNet’s own data centers.
