Gurtam’s 2023: a year in review

2023 has been a special year for our Gurtam, filled with new achievements and moments that made us proud and grateful. From reaching new milestones to gathering the entire team in Vilnius, this year has added remarkable chapters to Gurtam’s history. We welcome you to read Gurtam’s 2023: a year in review — a recap of this year’s accomplishments, highlighting new developments that happened with Wialon, flespi, and GPS-Trace, and cherishing the good memories we shared with our partners.

Meeting face-to-face in Vilnius, reaching out a helping hand to Ukraine, and focusing on quality

In 2023, Gurtam had a dynamic year filled with memorable happenings.

• In April, Gurtam reaffirmed its commitment to ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certifications, ensuring the implementation of best practices company-wide. The audit verified the continued compliance of our quality and information security management systems with global standards.

• We kept extending our support to Ukrainian partners. The total amount of support reached $500,000. We aimed to assist the company’s partners in sustaining their businesses, utilizing Wialon to their advantage, and benefiting their end users.

• Our efforts extended beyond product development to include knowledge-sharing. We arranged multiple meet-ups for developers and not just them (Gurtam Front-end Meet-up, Gurtam Python Meet-up, Gurtam Tech Lead Meet-up, and Gurtam Marketing Meet-up) and hosted the flespi-powered hackathon.

But perhaps the most memorable one was Big Week 2023: a grand get-together of Gurtam employees from around the world in Vilnius, Lithuania, dedicated to Gurtam’s 20th anniversary. Big Week was not a simple corporate party event — we organized 15 team meetings, spent 23 hours sharing knowledge, and had lots of fun together. 

Wialon in 2023: Reaching new milestones, climbing new mountains

New connections in 2023

In 2023, Wialon partners connected over 300,000 new vehicles, underscoring the platform's dynamic expansion and collaborative success. 

Milestone partners:

• Geoloc Conseils, a telematics service provider in France and West Africa, connected the 3,500,000th unit.

• Three months later, Rastreasul, a Brazilian fleet management company, connected the 3,600,000th unit.

• In September, we hit the 3,700,000 units milestone with GPS.AZ, a major telematics provider in Azerbaijan connecting the milestone unit.

• A few days ago, Trans Global Geomatics from India connected the 3,800,000th unit on Wialon! We will tell you more about this partner very soon. Stay tuned!

Sreenivas Grandhi, Trans Global Geomatics CEO, took part in the Wialon Challenge (you will learn about this epic event below)

Wialon’s evolution

This year, Wialon saw some major improvements. These include the rollout of a revamped login page design, the addition of CO2 emissions data and reports, live streams from vehicle cameras directly accessible on the Monitoring tab, and more.

Moreover, French and Portuguese-speaking partners can now read Wialon Hosting documentation in their respective languages, which gives them a more in-depth understanding of the product.

Wialon now has a dedicated website. It’s a special space for our potential and current partners full of useful information, including a blog, partner map, a list of compatible hardware, a use cases library, marketing materials, and more.

Partner events and industry exhibitions

From Brazil to Indonesia, the Wialon team has traversed numerous miles in 2023, cultivating relationships with longstanding partners and forging connections with new ones.

We brought together our partners at Telematics CDMX 2023, Telematics Dubai 2023, and, of course, Telematics Vilnius 2023. The conference in Vilnius, the biggest event for the Wialon partner community, featured 30+ industry-leading speakers, and welcomed over 200 participants from 50 countries.

We honored our tradition of celebrating the biggest Wialon partners and announced the regional Wialon Top 10 2023 rankings. This year, we also revealed GPS Hardware Manufacturers Top 10, the ranking that showcases the most renowned manufacturers of telematics and IoT devices. 

The renowned Wialon IoT zone was featured around the globe, including Expo Seguridad in Mexico and GITEX in the UAE, and, notably, Brazil (Exposec) for the first time. We hope you had the chance to visit it in one of these locations. If not, in 2024, the IoT zone will appear again at several events — keep an eye on the events calendar!

In addition, the Wialon team actively participated in various events, serving as exhibitors and keynote speakers, exploring current and emerging fleet management trends. These events include the Commercial Vehicle Show and the Great British Fleet Event, Securex, Fleet Latam Conference, Fleet Europe Days, and Teltonica Summit in Nigeria.

But the highlight of our partner events in 2023 was undoubtedly the epic Wialon Challenge 2023. 15 visionary Wialon partners from various countries and regions joined 7 members of the Wialon team on an extraordinary quest to climb Mount Rinjani, the second-highest volcano in Indonesia.

flespi’s 2023 journey: flespi conf, product updates, 790,000 registered devices

In 2023, flespi expanded its reach and accomplished significant milestones, solidifying its presence in the market.

• At the beginning of the year, flespi achieved the milestone of half a million registered devices and concluded the year with an impressive number of 790,000+ devices. Alongside, the flespi data storage and processing system has been reinforced with a second data center in the Netherlands to provide datacenter-level redundancy.

• Webhooks: A brand-new feature has been delivered to the platform to serve as a core element of the Automation module and a foundational component for more advanced functionalities. Virtually any telematics data processing task within flespi can now be accomplished using webhooks.

• Video telematics functionality has finally become available. Working with video data in the GPS tracking and fleet management industry is now open to all users. Here’s a guide on how one can use this feature with your service or web application.

• BLE-based indoor monitoring: This technology gem finds more and more applications across industries. flespi capabilities for working with BLE equipment can be applied in hospitals, parking lots, warehouses, office buildings, and construction sites — nearly any business having operations and assets indoors.

• AI assistant-as-a-service: A series of experiments with OpenAI resulted in the implementation of a conceptually new, not to say revolutionary, chat assistant model. The impressive data array at its disposal covers the entire flespi Knowledge Base, blog articles, and endless forum topics. Together with flespi developers, the AI assistant provides all-tier support, responding 24/7 at a blazing-fast pace, thus simplifying the user experience and ushering in a new era in support and software development.

• flespi-powered hackathon: The event, held in August, proved that any telematics idea can be easily shifted to an MVP in only 2 days. Thirteen teams presented their solutions for eco-driving, indoor monitoring, vehicle crash detection, remote automated property management, real-time fleet events management, and much more.

• flespi conf 2023: In September, the flespi team made a groundbreaking move by stepping out from the digital realm to the real world. The first offline event held in Vilnius attracted around 100 attendees from across the globe. The event was packed with pure practical content, covering all topics ranging from platform architecture and concepts to analytics and security. 

Let us remind you that flespi is a telematics API backend created by a small team of Gurtam developers. The platform enables data ingestion, enrichment, and analysis from a variety of sources, including Wialon.

What’s new with GPS-Trace in 2023: building strong partnerships

GPS-Trace devoted a big part of 2023 to product development and support of its partners. 

• All hard work has paid off, with GPS-Trace reaching the number of 250 partners by the end of this year. This is a big growth – the milestone of 100 partners was just reached in February 2023! Consistently introducing new languages into the product offerings, five additional languages have become available on the website and Partner Panel this year. 

• GPS-Trace introduced Forguard, a new client application that allows partners to create and manage secure accounts for clients with flexible limits of units, geofences, and data storage. All this is under the full partner control, along with the per-unit and per-day billing with a two-level hierarchy of tariff plans. This offers a range of features and customization options for effective business management. Additionally, partners have the option to place details about their company and their logo, which will be visible to their customers directly within the mobile application. A partner can also try all the benefits of GPS-Trace in the trial version.

• Ruhavik and Petovik, the platform’s signature apps, saw a number of important updates this year: engine hour counters, multiple unit sharing, unit grouping, featuring a distinct colored tail for each unit, nautical measurement system, track data export in .xlsx, security mode, location sharing and so on.

Both GPS-Trace and flespi took part in Technology expo at Telematics Vilnius 2023, sharing a common booth. This allowed the teams to show other software solutions developed by Gurtam to Wialon partners and demonstrate how their usage can open up new possibilities for partner business’ growth.

All in all, 2023 has been a year of growth, collaboration, and innovation for Gurtam, further establishing our presence as a fleet management software developer in the global fleet management market. We extend our sincere thanks to our partners for their invaluable contributions and look forward to another year of shared success.

Grateful, always.