Real-time transportation visibility platforms diversify and compete with TMS – Berg Insight

Berg Insight, the leading IoT market research provider, today released a new research paper covering real-time transportation visibility platforms. Many companies today offer various types of visibility functionality for the transport sector. Players active in this space range from niche visibility providers and more general transport management system providers, through broader supply chain and logistics software vendors, to providers of fully integrated business management IT solutions such as enterprise resource planning systems.

Key players in this market include Project44, FourKites and Shippeo which have all focused on visibility platforms specifically. “Project44 and FourKites are both US-based companies active on the global market, while Shippeo is based in France”, said Rickard Andersson, Principal Analyst, Berg Insight. He adds that these companies all have extensive partner ecosystems, ranging from ELD and telematics companies to TMS, WMS and ERP system vendors as well as consulting firms and system integrators. Project44 alone has more than 1,400 telematics integrations and 80 TMS/ERP integrations. FourKites also works with various partner companies having hundreds of enterprise technology offerings including ERP, TMS, WMS, dispatch and other supply chain technologies. Shippeo’s network in turn integrates with over 1,100 TMS, telematics and ELD systems.

“In addition to Project44, FourKites and Shippeo which have had an explicit focus on visibility platforms specifically, other major players in this space include Transporeon and Descartes which are also key TMS providers”, continued Mr. Andersson. The respective visibility products of Transporeon and Descartes also feature large numbers of integrations through extensive partner ecosystems. Trimble-owned Transporeon extended its transportation logistics offering with the addition of Sixfold’s real-time visibility technology, while Descartes acquired MacroPoint which is one of the largest supply chain visibility networks. The transport management and visibility markets are expected to continue to amalgamate in the coming years through continued M&A activities and in-house development efforts aimed at achieving true end-to-end supply chain visibility.

Visibility can hardly be defined as a product category of its own, as it is largely the outcome of an abundance of integrations, and even the specific real-time transportation visibility (RTTV) platforms are over time adding features increasingly positioning them as TMS players – thus resulting in also an element of competition between TMS and RTTV providers. “Multiple players which have historically positioned themselves as leading providers of real-time transportation visibility platforms specifically are today using other homegrown monikers to describe their respective businesses and supposedly unique offerings”, concluded Mr. Andersson.