Hughes Telematics: A seamless journey "from Drive to Park"

Andrew

Andrew Tolve

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25th June 2012

Briefly, what does your department/company do?

Using a flexible and innovative architecture, Hughes Telematics, Inc. (HTI) provides personalized connected services that empower the lifestyles of our customers. HTI’s vision is to support a truly connected world.

To accomplish this vision, the Atlanta-based company offers a portfolio of location-based services for consumers, manufacturers, fleets and dealers through two-way wireless connectivity.

What is your role in the Telematics market?

HTI has expertise in various roles across the telematics ecosystem.

Through the combined efforts of our offerings—embedded, aftermarket, fleet and mobile health—we have deep experiences in hardware engineering, application development, provisioning, carrier management, marketing, customer life-cycle management, content aggregation, call center management and mobile application development.

Our core competency is the development and delivery of reliable, connected services to the mobile market.

What was the most challenging part of 2011 for your company and how was it overcome?

Because HTI is a part of a high-tech industry, we constantly see newly introduced technologies that challenge even the latest solutions in the marketplace.

HTI makes significant investments in research and development to stay in stride, if not ahead, of this continuous innovation.

What challenges do you think the telematics industry still faces?

As connectivity becomes a mainstay in the vehicle, the challenges the telematics industry may face are the potential government regulations related to the use of mobile connected services.

We, as an industry, have to collaborate on the development of standards that ensures driver safety is never compromised.

With so much competition among automakers, can technical openness succeed? How do you see the industry addressing the challenges of open innovation?

Open innovation and open source solutions, like all technologies, have pros and cons. Clearly, the value of open technologies is the universal value it presents to customers across multiple product lines.

The most significant downside to open source technology is the loss of control over the applications that may impact the correct operation of the technology or even the vehicle. For instance, imagine a day when a third-party application causes an airbag deployment to fail.

What developments/trends do you see impacting the industry over the next 2-5 years?

The trends of connected vehicles are all about giving drivers more solutions to make their journey seamless and enjoyable from Drive to Park. Although automotive telematics began as safety and security services for vehicles, it has evolved to inform and connect consumers too.

In the next two to five years, I see three major trends:

(1) the acceleration of the ability of the aftermarket telematics solution

(2) greater smartphone integration

(3) new business models

Although these trends are not necessarily new to the industry, we will begin to see them in the mainstream market.

Other trends that will influence telematics technology include cloud computing, over-the-air software updates, personalization and content portability.