Summit Partners and FleetCor Technologies Acquire Masternaut, a European Leader in Telematics

Growth equity investor Summit Partners today announced a joint venture with FleetCor Technologies, Inc. to acquire Masternaut Group Holdings Limited, Europe’s largest provider of telematics solutions to commercial fleets, from Francisco Partners.
Masternaut’s management team, led by its experienced CEO Martin Hiscox, will continue to operate the business and remain shareholders in the company.
Founded in 1996 and with headquarters in the U.K., Masternaut provides a SaaS-based Mobile Resource Management (MRM) application suite for businesses of all sizes to help them achieve greater operational efficiencies through a lowering of vehicle fuel consumption, effective tracking of assets, productivity increases in workforce, reduced vehicle wear and tear, improved management of driver behavior, and a reduction in CO2 emissions. The company has over 300,000 assets, vehicles and people connected to its SaaS solutions. More than 15,000 users interact every hour with the systems, and over 50 million data transactions are processed and configured into 20,000 reports daily. With customers in 32 countries, Masternaut has multiple offices and partners throughout Europe, North America, South America and Asia.
“We are excited to partner with both Summit Partners and FleetCor,” said Martin Hiscox, CEO of Masternaut.
“Summit Partners brings a wealth of experience in helping fast growing companies reach their goals. FleetCor is a leading global provider of fuel cards and workforce payments products to the same commercial fleet customers that Masternaut serves. We look forward to exploring significant cross marketing opportunities that exist between our companies to accelerate the growth of Masternaut. We also would like to thank Francisco Partners for their tremendous support of our company over the last four years.”
“We are very pleased to complete the acquisition of Masternaut,” said Han Sikkens, a Managing Director with Summit Partners.
“The company is the pan-European market leader in telematics-based solutions led by a very strong and experienced management team. With the largest R&D team in Europe, Masternaut continuously innovates to deliver the most reliable and scalable platform available on the market today.”
John Carroll, a Managing Director with Summit added:
“We are also excited to partner with FleetCor, a company we originally backed in 2002 that has become an undisputed global leader in its industry and that can bring a lot of valuable assets and know-how to support the continued growth of Masternaut.”
Ron Clarke, Chairman and CEO of FleetCor said:
“We are delighted to team up with Summit Partners in acquiring Masternaut. In a short period of time, Masternaut has developed the best-in-class telematics product and a pan-European footprint. We at FleetCor have valuable fleet customer and partner relationships in Europe. Combination of the two would allow us to deliver more value to our clients, differentiate our product offerings, and ultimately grow our businesses.”
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Telit Debuts Telit ATOP 3.5G at Telematics Detroit

New Flagship Automotive Product Integrates Expansive Processing Power with HSPA+, GPS/GLONASS and NFC for a Variety of OEM Connected Car Applications.
Telit Wireless Solutions, a leading global vendor of high-quality machine-to-machine (M2M) modules, value-added services and solutions, today introduced the new Telit ATOP 3.5G, its new flagship product resulting from the recent acquisition of the Automotive Telematics On-board unit Platform (ATOP) business from Netherlands-based NXP Semiconductors (Nasdaq NXPI).
The ATOP 3.5G simplifies the development of automotive applications such as road pricing and eCall thanks to its unique integration of all required technologies, including: 3G cellular connectivity for voice and data communication; GPS/GLONASS for location, and near-field communications for driver authentication or to facilitate mobile payments directly from the car.
In addition, the ATOP 3.5G offers unparalleled processing power, thanks to three onboard processors. An application processor runs Java J9 Virtual Machine for simple code creation and portability. A dedicated interface processor manages vehicle interface using a choice of technologies including CAN, USB, Ethernet, UART and ADC. Plus, the optional SmartMX smartcard CPU with Java card JCOP OS provides embedded, hardware-based security for rock-solid fraud prevention and data integrity, suitable for end-to-end transaction systems requiring Common Criteria level 5+.
Fully backward-compatible with the 2.5G product already on the market from NXP, the Telit ATOP 3.5G is available in three variants for global network coverage.
Dominik Hierl, CEO of Telit Automotive Solutions said:
“The ATOP 3.5G supports an industry leading range of features from a single package. It is a perfect complement to the rest of our ONE STOP. ONE SHOP. products and services offering, designed to make the integration of connected functionality easier than ever for Automotive OEMs to adopt and commercialize.”
The first new product from the recently formed Telit Automotive Solutions business unit, the ATOP 3.5G joins a family of products designed specifically to meet the needs of the Automotive OEM marketplace. Telit automotive products are subject to automotive-grade lifecycle and process management. They offer easy scalability thanks to family form factors; global operations, and global regulatory and carrier certification. Moreover, they represent industry-leading innovation with a roadmap to the latest, cutting-edge technologies plus intelligent integration of new hardware, software and services functionalities.
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Wearable Technology $50 Billion Investment Frenzy

By Dr Peter Harrop, IDTechEx.
Many giant electronics manufacturers, computer services companies and conglomerates have tens of billions of dollars in the bank that is instantly available for investment to counter their saturating sales in mature markets. Samsung, General Electric and Google are examples and Apple even has $133 billion available. They all seek, “the next big thing”, preferably one or more emerging, potentially-huge markets that can leverage the skills they have honed in such things as mobile phones and their services. Wearable technology has attracted their close attention as many of them have or are developing such technology and associated services and Google Trends has a graph headed heavenwards in the last few months to show that they are certainly not alone.
In March 2014, Facebook announced it will buy Oculus VR, a Californian company which specialises in virtual reality headsets, for around $2 billion. Now Apple is negotiating to buy the company Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion, its biggest ever expenditure on a takeover. Beats is not huge: it has 27% of the $1.8 billion US headphones business mainly because of its premium pricing. Indeed, it has 57% of the premium sector of that market and it also has a music streaming service, both of which can leverage existing Apple offerings in wearable electronics.
Facebook and Apple do not talk of paybacks, calling the investments strategic, probably meaning that they are proceeding regardless. Many of these huge “gut feel” investments also tick a box under newly hot topics overlapping wearable technology namely “Internet of People (IoP)” or “Internet of Things (IoT)”. These devices are directly internet-identified now that IPv6 allows an effectively infinite number of IP addresses to be issued. IDTechEx predicts that as many as 55 billion IoP devices in use in 2025, many employing printed, flexible electronics and completely new components.
Recently, Google has paid a strategic $3.2 billion for the small IoT/IoP company Nest Labs that has made a few million connected smart thermostats and smoke and carbon dioxide detectors. Nest hopes to earn more from selling measurement analytics than from the devices themselves. These devices detect and respond to personal needs just like much wearable technology where Google must have already committed at least $1 billion to the internal development of the exciting Google Glass, an experimental diagnostic contact lens for diabetics and a planned smart watch, all actually or potentially connected wearable technology – IoP.
One use of Google Glass is in industry. In February 2014, GE announced it would invest $1.5 billion into “industrial internet” research from 2012 to 2015. Now watch giant Cisco with over $46 billion in the bank and intense interest in IoP and IoT and early participation in these markets as a system integrator. Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are circling. The investment frenzy continues.
IDTechEx has covered these developments in its reports “Wearable Technology 2014-2024: Technologies, Markets, Forecasts“, “E-Textiles: Electronic Textiles 2014-2024“, “Internet of Things (IoT): Business Opportunities 2015-2025” and “Internet of People: Technology 2015-2025“, see www.IDTechEx.com/Research.
FactSet has named the top 10 cash-rich companies, and half of them are in the tech industry: Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Apple and Oracle. Combined, these five tech companies held $245 billion in cash and all are intensely interested in wearable technology, IoT and IoP. Sprinkling a few billion here and there to participate does not “bet the shop” for any of these companies.
It is a good time to be a small business launching inspired wearable and other electronics for humans.
You may get bought for an eye watering sum of money. Alternatively, IDTechEx counsels that you do not meet the giants head on but take a look at the smaller but still substantial sector of wearable electronics for animals with an initially addressable market of 20 billion animals managed by humans. Later, that business will add substantial wearable electronic ID, diagnostics, location and treatment for billions of endangered species as we destroy the world around us. The big boys are giving that a miss for now.
See the new IDTechEx report, “Wearable Technology for Animals 2015-2025“, coming soon to www.IDTechEx.com/research.
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Demand grows for multi-technology SON as mobile operators look to deploy M2M infrastructure

Cellwize sees growing demand for multi-technology SON as mobile operators look to deploy M2M infrastructure.
Cellwize, the innovative Self-Optimizing Network (SON) solutions provider announced today that an increasing number of mobile operators are looking to deploy cross-technology and multi-vendor Self-Optimizing Network (SON) solutions to boost 2G, 3G and LTE networks. One reason for this is that with the drive towards creating the infrastructure for M2M, optimizing the sometimes-forgotten 2G network is back on top of operators’ agendas.
Ofir Zemer, CEO of Cellwize, said:
“At the moment, there’s a definite focus on 3G and 4G technologies, yet 2G’s role is sometimes overlooked. Fact is, it is still the trusted workhorse for so many operators and 2G does provide ubiquitous coverage. That’s why most IoT and M2M devices currently use 2G – it is the most efficient form of a connection.”
“The good news is that operators are looking to the future too. We’ve observed increasing interest for holistic SON solutions that support 2G, 3G and LTE. A SON solution needs to meet the demands of today’s network and be future proof to meet tomorrow’s needs.”
Cellwize’s observations are in line with a recent report from Machina Research. M2M is currently dominated by 2G and Machina Research predicts that by 2022, 3G and LTE will account for almost 90% of connections. Currently, since the transition from 2G to 3G for IoT is slow, operators need to ensure their IoT Service Level Agreements (SLA) are guaranteed through the implementation of a SON solution that supports the optimisation of multiple technologies.
Cellwize’s centralized SON (C-SON) solutions have proven popular amongst operators as it can deliver outstanding coverage for 2G and works seamlessly to deliver 3G and LTE. elastic-SON(tm) is able to make the most out of the entire network by providing mobility, robustness and retainability. It can deliver 25 percent more capacity, 30 percent increase in data throughput and 10 percent more coverage.
Cellwize was founded by Radio Frequency (RF) engineers who mastered network topology and network behaviour. The innovative market proven elastic-SON(tm) establishes the building blocks to support customer-centric use cases with its Value Driven-SON(tm), which uses Big Data insight to self-adapt the network to meet customer needs in real time. Cellwize SON solutions are very fast; able to access, analyse and moderate 40,000 sectors in 47 sec from data collection to SON recommendation using 1 non-unique server.

About Cellwize
Cellwize provides cutting-edge SON (Self Organizing Network) solutions to mobile operators. Mobile networks empowered by its proprietary elastic-SON ™ continuously react to real-time changes and match capacity, coverage and quality with evolving usage patterns and users’ needs.
Cellwize was founded by telecom professionals and its technology was designed by RF experts mastering network topology and behaviors. Cellwize is headquartered in Singapore with R&D and sales offices across the EMEA region.
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M2M Technology Advances Healthcare System

Guest post by LeadingQuest.
In this time and age of digital technology, changes in almost every aspect of human life are inevitable. Technology in itself is constantly evolving everyday. Inventions, new and better products are introduced to the market every now and then. The Healthcare system is no exception.
Although, most medical equipments today still work as individual units, and medical practitioners and technicians still need to collaborate to generate a report on one specific aspect of a patient’s health. Often times, they would have to manually operate systems, devices and machines to generate the results. This whole tedious process does not only entail a lot of work, but requires a significant amount of time.
Fortunately, the healthcare industry has realized this inefficiency in the system and is slowly adapting to new technologies that can incredibly improve healthcare. Healthcare providers are now turning to Machine-to-machine technology, also known as E-Health, to provide more cost-efficient, reliable and enhanced services to their patients. As a result of the rapidly escalating cost of medical expenses, as well as Health Care reforms, particularly in the US and other countries adapting to a similar structure, medical providers and facilities decided to strengthen the role of connected health devices in delivering better healthcare services.
A report from Machina Research examined the impact of the possible adoption of technology that utilizes machine to machine connectivity to the healthcare sector, its viable outcomes and implications. Author of the new Sector Report Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communications in Healthcare 2013-23 and Machina Research Principal Analyst, Andy Castonguay said that:
“In a country like the United States, with healthcare spending nearing 20% of national GDP, M2M technology may well provide the single most promising approach to expanding health care services in a cost effective manner.”
“While the cost dynamics of healthcare are a key factor driving innovation in the field, connected health devices and applications are also proving to be a key element in improving patient engagement and health.”
LeadingQuest CEO, Clovis Lacerda agrees with Mr. Castonguay in this view. According to Mr. Lacerda, M2M Technology is the best way to advance the healthcare system and eliminate problems such as long waiting periods. It would also be very cost-efficient for healthcare providers and can save them millions of dollars. Providing M2M Healthcare Solutions is one of the primary services that LeadingQuest and Parlacom Brazil offers to its clients. These are customized M2M E-Health solutions and applications that have been effectively used in care facilities. He further mentioned that Parlacom Brazil is enhancing their services, and is looking into investing more in this area to increase sales force.
From the same report from Machina Research, M2M connected devices for the healthcare sector is anticipated to hit 847 billion by 2023. In this report, North America will be the largest, reaching 386 million connections, followed by Europe and developed countries in Asia Pacific. And the Healthcare industry will generate a total revenue of $90.9 billion from M2M technology.
Source: Machina Research
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