Geotab to acquire BSM Technologies

Geotab, a provider of IoT and connected transportation, announced that it has signed an arrangement agreement whereby it plans to acquire BSM Technologies.

BSM provides telematics and asset management solutions to more than 165,000 vehicles across government and private fleets in Canada and the United States. The completion of this transaction would add to the over 1.5 million fleet telematics subscribers utilising Geotab globally.

Over the past 20 years, BSM has developed extensive experience and customer relationships in the government sector, enabling municipalities and States/Provinces to optimise and manage their winter road maintenance fleets.

“BSM had previously standardised on using the Geotab platform as their base and then created a competitive advantage by building new products on top of our technology,” said Neil Cawse, Geotab CEO. “An example of this is winter ops – support for data and the management of snow plows and spreaders. This technology is key for our resellers to be able to win government business.”

By adopting the Geotab platform, BSM’s customers in government as well as other verticals including construction, service and rail, will not only benefit from Geotab’s leading engineering expertise and award-winning focus on security, scalability and reliability but will also gain access to solutions for enhanced visibility into vehicle performance, driver habits, accident detection and more.

Geotab’s leadership is reflected in major account wins including the awarding of the world’s largest single-source telematics contract in history by GSA Fleet, a division of the GSA (General Services Administration), to equip its 217,000 US government vehicles with Geotab technology.

Placing security at the forefront of its innovations, Geotab announced earlier this year that the cryptographic module in the company’s GO vehicle tracking device received FIPS 140-2 validation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Geotab is the first and only telematics company to achieve this standard.

“BSM’s activity in the government space coupled with Geotab’s proven success and commitment to security and scalability will work in tandem to dramatically accelerate Geotab’s presence across North America including in the electric vehicle space, which is an increasingly important emerging market,” added Cawse.

Geotab has a long-standing history of providing customers with access to an open-platform solution that enables fleets to customise and scale their telematics implementation to meet their business needs. This approach has allowed the company to closely align with strategic partners that provide customisable solutions to help improve productivity, fuel efficiency, driver safety and more.

Through this transaction, BSM customers will also benefit from Geotab’s partner ecosystem. BSM will contribute some of its product and services development in asset tracking, winter ops, third-party integration and off-road equipment tracking to the Geotab Marketplace, Geotab’s extensive online solutions centre for managing mobile assets and workers.