“The cost of the software licence for the original system had gone up fivefold in almost as many years,” says Peter Crinson. “We decided we simply had to find something offering the same or better features at a much more affordable price.”
Having run extensive evaluations of four possible replacement products, the company opted for GeoConcept. “It won on the basis of its feature set, ease of integration, fast development capability, supplier support and price,” Peter Crinson says. “It wasn’t the cheapest option available, but the price was still less than a quarter that of our previous system, and GeoConcept offered the best overall package.”
Approaching 15,000 vehicles are equipped with TRACKER Network’s on-board GPS-based location reporting and management systems. GeoConcept Internet Server is being used by the company to generate the on-screen maps that customers see when they call up real-time or historical views of their vehicles’ locations. These are created “on the fly” when users request position updates through the browser interface.
“We were determined that whatever new solution we introduced, we must be able to provide a seamless changeover from the old system, so that users wouldn’t have to learn new interface features or come to terms with different behaviour or a new look. This was our paramount concern.”
He says the switch to GeoConcept fulfilled that ambition completely. “It took us a few iterations to ensure that the system worked consistently with various different browsers and firewall configurations,” he says, “but we expected that. When we actually came to the point of implementation, it was trouble-free.”
Introducing GeoConcept has also brought other benefits, he adds. “It has a particularly extensive set of development capabilities, so we have much more control now over the way we will be able to adapt and enhance our product in future.”
Already, he says, the company has developed the facility for users to right-click their mouse button in order to call up contextual detail. “With our old system we couldn’t have done that nearly so easily.” Further new features will follow over time.
GeoConcept is one of the world’s leading geographic information systems, and is used widely in many business sectors for editing, presenting and analysing mapping and related data. GeoConcept Internet Server offers essentially the same feature set, adding the ability to generate mapping suitable for use on intranets and the Internet. MapMechanics distributes and supports the system exclusively in Britain.
TRACKER Network had already been using digital map data supplied by MapMechanics for many years, but Peter Crinson says this fact had no bearing on its adoption of GeoConcept. “We chose the product on its own merits,” he says.
The mapping supplied by MapMechanics includes both Navteq Premium Streets vector map data of Britain and Andes mapping, the raster dataset derived from it. TRACKER Network also uses a range of mapping from MapMechanics for other areas, including street-level mapping for Ireland and Spain.
The company code-names its own applications Chameleon (the host server) and Vapour (the browser application). To use the new system, customers simply perform a one-off download (just 30 seconds on broadband) of a TRACKER-developed GeoConcept-based ActiveX browser plug-in.
TRACKER Network is one of Britain’s longest-established vehicle and asset tracking and management suppliers, having been launched in 1993. It runs a range of stolen vehicle recovery services and fleet management systems. www.TRACKER.co.uk |
