GRAPEVINE, Texas — Omnitracs, the largest provider of in-cab communications systems for the trucking industry, is spending the better part of this year completing its separation from Qualcomm, CEO John Graham said.
That means the companies are sorting out the financial accounts, labs, data centers and real estate, he said.
“We’re still in the Qualcomm building,” said Graham, adding that the separation process is going well.
Qualcomm finalized the $800 million sale of its subsidiary Omnitracs in November to Vista Equity Partners, a U.S.-based private equity firm that brought in two executives to run Omnitracs, Graham and Chief Financial Officer Jordan Copland, neither of whom had worked in the trucking industry.
The new executives were mingling with their carrier customers last week at the Truckload Carriers Association annual convention here.
“I’ve been on the road a lot visiting with our clients and meeting with them while we’re here and other places,” Graham said of how he’s becoming acclimated to the trucking industry.
“I think the fundamentals of still running a business translate through industries,” he said. “I’ve been in the technology industry for over 20 years, and I think, fundamentally, the foundation of growing your business, of how you invest and how you make money, there’s a lot of common denominators for that across industries.”
Before coming to Omnitracs, Graham was president of the security, government and infrastructure division of Intergraph Corp., a global technology firm that provides geospatial, mobility and resource-management technologies to the government and industry.
Graham and Copland, who worked in consumer products and technology, started their jobs at Omnitracs on the same day four months ago. Since then, the firm has bought another telematics company, RoadNet Technologies based in Baltimore, which will allow the San Diego-based Omnitracs to “touch” more of its customer base in the East and Midwest, Graham said.
“We need to support the platforms we have, we will, and we’re going to continue to sell the ones we have today,” he said. “But as we go forward long term, we really want to focus a lot of that energy on our core technologies that we host and provide to our clients.”
More coverage from the TCA conference will be included in the March 31 issue of Transport Topics.
