Smart, Connected Applications Drive IoT Road Side Safety

All Traffic Solutions needed to reduce software complexity so that they could quickly and effectively build out and enhance smart, connected applications without the need to develop their own backend infrastructure and development platform. Ted Graef, All Traffic Solution’s president, emphasizes that it is no longer enough for the company to deliver the best hardware; their hardware must become part of a larger ecosystem that is centered on automating all related business processes and evolving them into a simple-to-use suite of real-time, software-driven services. All Traffic Solutions took a significant step in its connected services evolution when the company decided to include standardized wireless capabilities in all of its products. The move required the company to its hardware costs, yet the belief was - and the reality turned out to be - that their customers would quickly be able to make up for the additional costs through significant improvements in workforce and customer service efficiency. The bold stroke, however, was not the conversion to wireless hardware. Rather, it was in recognizing that to be successful within a rapidly evolving mobile and wireless world, All Traffic Solutions had to also significantly enhance its software capabilities. Graef says the company understood that it had to deliver software that would provide valuable services, and make it easy for its customers to promptly make sense of the real-time data and alerts that would be transmitted and collected.

By allowing All Traffic Solutions to easily build and customize user interfaces, dashboards and mashups, ThingWorx enabled the company to focus 100 percent on specifically meeting their customer needs. Using ThingWorx, All Traffic Solutions can customize its TraffiCloud ecosystem to meet specific customer requirements, and keep UIs clean and easy to use. All Traffic Solutions' SmartApps, the TraffiCloud ecosystem, and the underlying cloud-based SaaS infrastructure and user interfaces represent a great deal of complexity. Yet, according to Graef, All Traffic Solutions was able to quickly deliver the third generation of its connected applications, including mapping, alerts, reporting, imaging, and equipment management, all entirely powered by ThingWorx. All Traffic's latest project, DriveTimes, is a service that provides an inexpensive yet highly flexible GPS-based replacement for "time to destination" highway and road notification message boards, and completely eliminates the need for field-based sensors. With ThingWorx and its rich application development toolset, it was a simple project for All Traffic to create the DriveTimes service, rapidly developing the necessary mashups, end-user controls, and route generation interface, and augmenting them with the GPS, data-gathering interface, and database on the backend services of TomTom™. The software service charges of DriveTimes would be dwarfed by the cost of any in-house built system, as there is barely any infrastructure or workforce maintenance cost for the customer, always the source of greatest ongoing cost to any in-house built project. All Traffic ensures that the entire system is always up-to-date at considerably less cost.

• [Efficiency Improvement - Operation]
  All Traffic Solutions now focuses entirely on its business strategy, delivering timely new connected application products and services
• [Efficiency Improvement - Time To Market]
  All Traffic Solutions has the ability to bring new services to market quickly

• The company increased productivity of customer workforces, enabling them to see a return in software service investment within 2 months