A few years ago, Microsoft Windows Mobile was still the main platform for in-cab devices in the transportation industry. The migration to Android began slowly but the pace accelerated when the ELD mandate brought new competition to the market.
Tens of thousands of “WinMo” devices are still used by fleets but the end is drawing near.
Ray Greer, chief executive of Omnitracs, estimates the company has 400,000 devices in the field that use the Windows Mobile CE operating system. Those devices are the MCP platform, which the company developed when it was a business unit of Qualcomm, and the IVG device that replaced the MCP from 2016 onward.
Omnitracs now has about 13,000 customers after it added between 1,000 and 2,000 within the last year, said Greer during an interview with CCJ on Oct. 7 at the American Trucking Associations MCE conference in San Diego.
Greer became CEO of Omnitracs in February 2018, less than five years after Vista Equity Partners purchased it in November 2013 from Qualcomm. Before taking the job, Greer asked Vista executives if they would “give me time to do what needs to get done” before selling the company. Vista executives had already tested the market and considered “taking some chips off the table to allow for a minority investment party,” said Greer, “but decided to stay the course.”
Omnitracs’ first-generation IVG platform was shipped with Windows CE but was designed to be updated to Android without removing it from the cab. The MCP devices cannot be updated to Android and will need to be replaced within the next two years, said Greer, since Microsoft will no longer be supporting Windows CE.
Omnitracs customers will soon begin migrating to its new Android platform, called Omnitracs One, in January 2020 using their existing IVG devices or any hardware they choose.
