Data was supposed to be the “new oil,” but that hasn’t panned out generally. It’s true that CIRRUS by Panasonic is a data operation at heart, and I truly believe that the future of connected vehicles will make or break around how well the companies creating the infrastructure execute data strategies. Many people challenge me on this because when they hear “data strategy” they quickly wonder how CIRRUS can make it work where others haven’t.
I’m realizing data means different things to different people and like with most things, the devil is in the details. Let’s dive in!
Pure Data Plays Don't Work
Let’s be blunt, data for data’s sake in V2X doesn’t work. Many companies have tried and utterly failed to make a sustainable scaled business out of just selling connected vehicle data. We do not think we can do it better and we are not following that path.
V2X “insights” plays don’t really work either. Revealing stuff from vehicle data that nobody asked for is as useless as a pure data play. This is also not what we’re building.
So, What Is CIRRUS?
CIRRUS is an action business. Information is little more than a curiosity unless it informs or drives action. Following our product evolution, you will notice examples where we’ve tweaked our data output to be more meaningful. For example, where we used to report intermittent hardware outages, we now only provide alerts for real outages that require intervention.
Figure 1: Connected vehicle data begins with coordinating input from multiple sources, including roadside and vehicle units.
Our partnership with the Panasonic CONNECT team, which makes TOUGHBOOK devices, also reflects this paradigm shift. While we call our system “Fleet Insights,” our full capability enables new kinds of actions that were not possible before CIRRUS.
Like all parts of the emerging connected vehicle industry, first-responder vehicles have a disconnected spiderweb of data providers all powering various single applications: CAD/AVL, CIPT, telematics, situational awareness, public alerting, evidence collection, insurance, and so on. These systems rarely talk to each other, and so the actions they power, while important, are narrow and limited.
Worse still, data duplication or overlap creates heavy operational burdens for agencies. Many antennas clutter a single vehicle, and multiple OBDII dongles create a maintenance nightmare for fleet managers. Duplicate streaming costs more money, disconnecting and reconnecting to data portals takes time. You get the picture.
Our core value proposition is getting data from the edge while simplifying the vehicle, especially where that’s hard to do in the first place, and then making it available for decision-making at scale.
It Starts with Architecture
Collecting data requires edge devices and a cloud architecture for collection and processing. CIRRUS has both. Edge devices include OBUs, RSUs, TOUGHBOOKS, and lights and sirens systems as primary sources (and the list is likely to grow). Our tech teams have implemented a unique patent-pending architecture for how to store and process this data at massive scale.
Putting the Data to Work
Once we have the data, we do several things with it. For example, you may be familiar with some of the management and monitoring solutions direct solutions we have built for our DOT clients.
With our TOUGHBOOKS partnership, CIRRUS goes well beyond that list, but we are not trying to boil the ocean by ourselves. Instead, we’re making our unique data sets available to a rapidly growing list of third-party partners who need exactly what we have, but either can’t get the data themselves or find it cheaper to buy it from us because of our innovations in IoT.
These partners will soon be able to generate their own use cases powered by CIRRUS, and you’ll see us showing up more and more across the connected vehicle landscape.
Scale Begets Scale
What’s most interesting about CIRRUS’s position isn’t just our technology innovations (of which there are several), but rather our ability to scale with the solid backing of Panasonic. Perhaps it’s our unique experience dealing with limited scale for several years in some of our specific technologies that enables us to see this, but we are uniquely positioned to access both sides of the marketplace for connected vehicle solutions in the government space.
With the TOUGHBOOK market share at around 65% and something like 400,000 computers circulating, we alone can deliver at a scale that’s meaningful to the public. That’s how you do data without being a “data play” and that’s how we’re thinking about the future of CIRRUS!