PeopleNet Users to See Few Changes After Purchase by Trimble, Officials Say

This story appears in the Aug. 29 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

BOCA RATON, Fla. — PeopleNet officials here emphasized repeatedly that their customers will see few, if any, changes resulting from their company’s recent acquisition by Trimble Navigation Ltd.

“What we’re planning and what we made sure of through this process was that we’re going to remain autonomous,” chief operating officer Brian McLaughlin said. He spoke at the cab communications company’s user conference earlier this month.

After the acquisition closed in early August, PeopleNet became a unit within Trimble’s mobile navigation unit. Apart from the mobile unit, Trimble has other major units focused on construction, agriculture and advanced devices such as Global Positioning System receivers, said Ron Konezny, PeopleNet’s chief executive officer.

“Trimble’s a company we’ve known for almost five years now and a very well-run company,” Konezny told customers. “They have a strong history of performance.”

Trimble has about 5,000 employees, about 500 of them based at its Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters, Konezny said. Founded in 1978 by Charlie Trimble, it has acquired about 60 companies in recent years, usually keeping them intact and operating similarly to how they operated before they were bought.

“The most important thing that Trimble saw in PeopleNet was a real vertical focus,” Konezny said. He is confident, he said, that Trimble, which had more than $1.5 billion in revenue last year, will allow PeopleNet to keep its “vertical focus” on transportation and logistics without branching into other sectors.

Trimble kept PeopleNet’s management and employees, which Konezny said was a prerequisite to his agreeing to the acquisition.

Customers will continue to see support for all of the products PeopleNet has sold and future upgrades to them, he added.

“Trimble is not a company that buys companies to smash them together,” McLaughlin said. “They buy companies to innovate.”

Trimble will focus initially on expanding PeopleNet to have an international presence beyond its current operations in the United States and Canada, Konezny said.

He will oversee the process to expand across the globe, likely to Mexico first, he said. He also will oversee Trimble’s European transportation operations, which are focused on a Belgian company formerly known as Punch Telematix, another recent Trimble acquisition.

Trimble also aims to expand PeopleNet into “adjacent products and services,” such as dispatch and route optimization applications, McLaughlin said.

“Two years from now, I think we’ll look a lot like we do now,” he said. “By then, I think we’ll have more international expansion.”

An advantage of being part of Trimble is that PeopleNet has access to Trimble’s resources and products, McLaughlin said. “Instead of maybe going outside for a piece of hardware or for a certain application, we can now source it inside.”

“We need to leverage some of their scale and some of their systems and solutions,” Konezny said, “to help lower the cost of our equipment, of our wireless solutions and in some cases share designs.”

Though PeopleNet’s product road map for the future has not changed since the acquisition, developments probably will be faster, because of Trimble’s resources.

“The road map is the road map,” McLaughlin said. “It accelerates our ability to get to those things.”

The main challenge for PeopleNet for the future probably is in accounting, McLaughlin said, because Trimble is a publicly traded company.

PeopleNet also will have to prioritize its development goals, given the new resources Trimble brings. “There’s so many good opportunities,” he said.

Both McLaughlin and Konezny called Trimble’s resources a candy store.

“Those are the things that Trimble can provide companies like us that they bring into their family,” Konezny said.