Drones Are The Future of Fleet Management

story by Sarah Murray

Few fleet managers would see attacks by bald eagles on their vehicles as a threat — that is until news emerged that Dutch company Guard From Above is training birds of prey to intercept hostile drones. However, while the birds will target unauthorized machines used in the execution of crime, legitimate commercial drones are not in their sights.

Aside from their offensive potential, drones offer a growing range of applications in the fields of security and surveillance. Much attention has focused on the possibility of drones delivering packages. But the difficulties of navigating urban areas safely means that, for now at least, there is greater commercial potential for use of drones by industries whose operations are in remote locations.

Monitoring the integrity of large, distant infrastructure such as wind farms and oil and gas installations is one task to which drones are suited. Monitoring gas flaring at oil and gasfields is one such example where drones can replace human surveillance, whether from the ground or aircraft.

“When you’ve got plants and machinery moving around, that’s where it’s ideal,” says James Harrison, co-founder and chief executive of Sky-Futures, which uses drones to inspect oil and gas installations. “They’re flying computers that can capture a lot of details and data that humans can’t, and from angles and places humans can’t get to.”

Moreover, drones do not get tired or bored. “Drones replace the individual where the job is very remote, tedious, time-consuming and prone to human error,” says Roei Ganzarski, president and chief executive of BoldIQ, whose software helps companies manage complex operations.

Drones can also help reduce the risk of fighting fires, particularly in areas prone to outbreaks such as Australia and parts of the western US, by helping crews understand more quickly the direction in which the fires are moving.

“With the smoke, you don’t want to put up a piloted aircraft,” says Mr Ganzarski. “A drone could fly into the fire and give real-time information on where to go to and where not to go to avoid risk.”

Farmers are harnessing drones’ capabilities. By flying over fields, the machines can collect accurate images of the state of planted crops, providing more detail than satellites. This allows farmers to identify areas where crops need more attention to increase yields. Using drones to spread fertiliser or pesticides across large areas of land means any accidents involve a machine rather than putting pilots at risk of injury or death in light aircraft. Across such industries, drone fleets could start to emerge as companies see the potential for the cost savings and increased safety during surveillance and other operations, says Simon Menashy, investment director at MMC Ventures, which has invested £2.5m in Sky-Futures. Many oil and gas operators are interested in deploying drones on their platforms permanently, says Mr Menashy. “And there are 10,000 oil rig platforms in place around the world.” But as the industrial use of drones spreads, a question for operators will be how to navigate the vast amounts of data generated by fleets of flying robots.

In some ways, managing drone fleets will not differ from other fleets. After all, logistics companies have long used software to collect real-time data on trucks and other vehicles to devise fuel-efficient routes and faster deliveries. However, the type and volume of information drones can collect and transmit will demand new forms of data analysis.

“There’s one big difference in the operation of drones versus trucks, vans and taxis, and that’s the threedimensional element,” says Mr Ganzarski. “A drone doesn’t just go down a fixed road — it can fly anywhere and at any altitude.” Rising drone usage may not spell the end of other types of fleets. “You’ll see a lot of companies taking on drones,” says Mr Ganzarski, “not necessarily as the main vehicle, but as a supplement or part of a mixed fleet.”

Meanwhile, data management, emerging regulations covering the operation of drones and the need to take steps to ensure they fly safely will create new challenges for fleet managers.

This is not seen as a barrier to the growth of drone fleets, however. According to the Teal Group, a US-based research and analysis firm, global spending on the production of unmanned aerial vehicles — for both military and commercial use — will reach $93bn in the next 10 years. It is an industry with high-flying potential — in every sense.

See the full story in FT.com

BoldIQ Team Find out how BoldIQ helps companies stay on schedule

The Bellevue company develops software aimed at helping transportation companies handle scheduling in a more efficient and cost-effective manner.

What: Bellevue-based BoldIQ, a developer of optimization and scheduling software for big transportation companies

Who: Roei Ganzarski, president and CEO

Demand for on-demand: BoldIQ helps on-demand services such as private airlines and delivery vehicles so that they can schedule their staff, cars and planes efficiently. As the on-demand economy booms, BoldIQ has been expanding its scheduling software into more industries.

New way of thinking: The company’s technology inputs data from every part of the business, including, for example, every job delivery trucks must complete in a given day, as well as immediate jobs as they get called in. The system also accounts for such industry regulations as employee lunch breaks and hours worked.

Building blocks: While not disclosing how its technology is built, Ganzarski said the company uses factors not common in software development, including physics and thermodynamics. “A (jet company), for example, would use our software to behave much bigger than they are,” Ganzarski said. “Because with the same number of planes and pilots, they can fly more people than their competitors can.”

In the moment: BoldIQ’s software can take data with thousands of factors and within seconds make a schedule that best uses all resources within a second. The company’s technology allows for last-minute changes and alerts, so other arrangements can be made.

Boeing boon: BoldIQ is working with Jepessen, a Boeing company, to license BoldIQ technology so that Boeing commercial airline customers can use the software.

Save money, save time: BoldIQ’s technology aims to help businesses save on everything from fuel costs to overtime spending, Ganzarski said. For example, BoldIQ helped private airline JetSuite manage planes and pilots so it can now fly each of its 200 airplanes more than 100 hours per month.

A plane start: BoldIQ’s roots launched in the early 2000s under the name DayJet, a company that used scheduling technology to operate an on-demand airplane service, mostly for business travelers. That company shut down, but its technology and early employees carried over to BoldIQ.

New industries: BoldIQ, with 14 employees in Bellevue, works with aviation and ground transportation customers. It plans to add health care within the next 18 months. Its software can help with scheduling nurses and operating rooms, Ganzarski said. The profitable startup raised a funding round from investors in 2013, and last month added Paul Maritz, the former CEO of VMware and DayJet investor, to its board.

Click here for the full story in Seattle Times

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Our Customer Executive AirShare Continues Growth Path

Executive AirShare has grown from a small regional Midwestern U.S. charter operator into a fractional-share provider serving the entire U.S. market.

EAS will continue to expand, likely into new regions in the U.S. Plumb, who took on the CEO role two years ago, has since focused on scalability, to enable EAS to grow efficiently. This includes adding new accounting and operations software (BoldIQ’s Astro) and hiring Mike Bianchi, a former airline v-p of operations, to run the maintenance department.

“We’ve been profitable since the financial crisis,” Taylor concluded. “We’ve expanded every year. We continue to refine our recipe for success and make the business more scalable, and we’re in an excellent position.”

Click here to read the full article in AIN

Boldiq Names New VP Of Engineering & Development – Christer Lundin To Lead All Engineering And Development Activities

BoldIQ has hired Christer Lundin as vice president of engineering & development. Lundin, with over 20 years of experience in the software industry, will be responsible for directing all of the company’s software engineering and development activities including the migration of key software solutions to cloud-based services.

“We are at the perfect point on our growth path to add a world-class software leader,” said Roei Ganzarski, President and CEO of BoldIQ. “Christer’s track record as an innovative technology leader speaks for itself and his experience, expertise and leadership will enable us to continue and push the realm of possible as we provide real-time dynamic scheduling as a service to our customers.”

Prior to joining BoldIQ, Lundin held leadership positions at Microsoft for 17 years, including most recently serving as Senior Director of Engineering for the Windows Azure – Server and Cloud Division where he was responsible for developing and implementing a number of first class highly available, scalable, distributed systems. Prior to Microsoft, Lundin led R&D at Sendit, a Swedish company eventually acquired by Microsoft, and worked at IBM Sweden and the World Bank. Lundin also served in the Swedish Military and earned his MSc in Engineering from the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology.

Read the full release here

Why BoldIQ joined the Washington Technology Industry Association

Washington State is a hotbed of technology companies, many of them global trendsetters. It is only natural that leaders like Amazon, Microsoft, and F5 (to name a few) are major influencers and are listened to. But there are a lot of small technology companies in the region as well, many of them doing amazing things. WTIA provides a cohesive, overarching, and clear voice for all of us that alone, cannot be heard. Be it labor, education, or policy issues, the WTIA enables the small to act big. That is why BoldIQ joined WTIA and that is why Roei Ganzarski, BoldIQ president & CEO sits on the advisory board.

Click to read the WTIA annual report

Fortune on Startup BoldIQ Adds Legendary Software Exec Paul Maritz to Board

Paul Maritz, the former chief executive at VMware  VMW -2.56%  and Pivotal after a stint as a top exec at Microsoft, is joining the board of BoldIQ.

The Bellevue, Wash. company focuses on helping companies allocate and schedule big, expensive resources—airplanes, trucks, medical technicians—efficiently, using technology built at Dayjet, a company that helped business people share private jets.

Maritz has history here. He invested in Dayjet, which had great technology but bad timing. “The short version is that I inherited BoldIQ out of Dayjet which was ahead of its time, trying to be the Uber for the private jet business 15 years ago. Unfortunately, it didn’t survive the crash of 2008,” Maritz told Fortune in an interview.

But Dayjet’s scheduling and logistics technology lives on in BoldIQ.

The BoldIQ-Uber comparison only goes so far, Maritz said. “Uber doesn’t require as complex a model because it draws on a huge number of drivers. The air taxi business deals with precious resources. Being able to efficiently schedule them to get more than one passenger on each plane required advanced software,” he noted.

BoldIQ, which has raised just under $8 million in venture funding, is applying that technology to all sorts of businesses including freight delivery, home appliance repairs, hospital staff scheduling, and, yes, aviation.

The appliance service model is illustrative. In the Seattle area, one unnamed BoldIQ customer is able to perform 1000 home appliance service calls per day using 100 technicians. “We have to make sure two things happen, one that the company can provide most of the services needed and two how to do it in a way that’s timely for customers and prevents overwork by employees,” said Roei Ganzarski, chief executive of BoldIQ.

Using BoldIQ, service companies can schedule repair calls on the fly so if one technician calls in sick or shows up to an empty house, the schedule can be adjusted accordingly, said Ganzarski.

BoldIQ competes with products like IBM’s  IBM -0.01% iLog optimization engine as well as home-grown solutions.

“We also compete with not-invented-here syndrome,”Ganzarski said. His take is that BoldIQ can help aircraft companies, hospitals, and doctors schedule resources in a way that’s more efficient for both the provider and the consumer of the service, without any of those providers having to build their own scheduling system.

So what’s BoldIQ’s secret ingredient for handling all this complexity? “Russian rocket scientists,” Maritz and Ganzarski said almost in unison. “We’re not kidding,” Maritz added. The company’s team profile does indicate the presence of quite a few Russian techies..

The company claims JetSuite, GlobeAir, and Jeppeson, a unit of Boeing  BA -0.76% , as customers.

“If you can help an aircraft operator cut 50% of costs and make 20% more flights, everyone wins,” he noted. BoldIQ takes a cut of any savings.

Businesses can run BoldIQ’s software on Amazon  AMZN 1.18%  Web Services, Microsoft  MSFT 1.86% Azure public clouds, or on their own internal systems, Ganzarski said.

Read the full article here

BoldIQ Welcomes Paul Maritz to its Board of Directors

BoldIQ is at a key inflection point. Over the last year our business has grown, we have expanded into new markets, grown our employee base and provided services in the cloud, pioneering optimization as a service.

I can’t think of a better time to welcome Paul Maritz, technology visionary and former CEO of Pivotal and VMware to join BoldIQ’s Board of Directors!

Paul was an initial investor in BoldIQ and quickly realized the enormous potential and promise of our technology across a number of industries. Now in an official leadership position, Paul’s cloud and global service-based experience will be invaluable to our future success as we begin to expand globally with cloud-based solutions.

Paul brings more than 30 years of technology leadership experience to BoldIQ. Before leading Pivotal and VMware, Paul was President of the Cloud Infrastructure and Services Division at EMC after the company’s February 2008 acquisition of Pi, where he was the founder and CEO. Before founding Pi, Paul spent 14 years working at Microsoft, where he served as a member of the five-person Executive Committee that managed the overall company and was responsible for the product development and marketing of the Windows Client.

Paul is noted for his vast knowledge of cloud-based offerings and a vision. Bill Gates once said he had a “major impact not only on Microsoft but on the entire computer industry.” Paul’s guidance and expertise will help BoldIQ continue to disrupt how companies think about and act on their operations.

Welcome to the team, Paul!

You can view the official press release here. You can also view a GeekWire story here and a Fortune story here.

GeekWire on BoldIQ and new board member Paul Maritz

Paul Maritz, the former CEO of VMware and Pivotal Software, has joined the board of BoldIQ, a Bellevue, Wash.-based company that makes technology to quickly and efficiently schedule everything from trucks and planes to doctors and nurses.

Maritz, who made his mark as a high-ranking Microsoft executive, overseeing landmark versions of Windows, was an original investor in BoldIQ. The company’s technology traces its roots to DayJet, an on-demand business airline in which Maritz was an investor. DayJet folded in the 2008 crash, but the need for dynamic resource scheduling has only grown since then, Maritz said in an interview with GeekWire.

“This is a very interesting idea whose time has come,” Maritz said. “The on-demand economy demands this kind of a capability. Fortunately we’re in the right place to provide it.”

“Everything is now moving towards the on-demand model,” he explained. “On-demand cars, on-demand grocery shopping, on-demand repairs. Unlike Uber, in many cases in the on-demand world the underlying resource is not in infinite supply. To be efficient you have to schedule it efficiently and you have to schedule it to be where and when the customer wants it.”

Recalling a phrase from his Microsoft days, Maritz said, “I think BoldIQ can be the ‘Intel Inside’ of the on-demand economy.”

Maritz, who turned 60 last year, remains executive chairman at Pivotal but has taken himself out of day-to-day operational roles, freeing himself up to pursue a handful of for-profit and non-profit projects, devoting more time to investments that he has made over the past 10 years. On the non-profit side, for example, he’s the chairman of the board of the Mifos Initiative, an open source financial software platform.

BoldIQ is in the process of expanding its technology to a wider variety of industries and companies. Roei Ganzarski, the company’s CEO, described a test with a technical services company that was able to reduce, by 10 percent, the number of miles driven by its technicians, while also offering more reliable scheduling for customers.

The company will be offering those types of capabilities not only to large companies but also as a cloud-based service to smaller businesses that wouldn’t have the technology infrastructure or financial wherewithal to do dynamic scheduling on their own.

“Think of it as commoditization of optimization, if you will,” Ganzarski said.

The company’s most recent funding round was $3 million, raised in 2013. BoldIQ has 16 employees, but that reflects the fact that company outsources non-core functions such as marketing, public relations, finance and accounting, Ganzarski said. Maritz is the largest individual shareholder in the company, which is cash-flow positive.

Read the full article here

Technology Leader Paul Maritz Bets on Real-Time Dynamic Optimization, Joins BoldIQ Board of Directors

BoldIQ Inc., a global provider of sophisticated dynamic scheduling software, today announced technology leader Paul Maritz, former CEO of Pivotal and VMware, and former SVP of Microsoft, has joined its Board of Directors.

Maritz was an initial investor in BoldIQ and brings a strong background in cloud-based technology and global service-based experience at a pivotal time for BoldIQ as it expands globally with cloud-based solutions.

“BoldIQ’s technology has enormous potential across many different industries, and I am excited to help guide BoldIQ and contribute to the company’s continued success,” said Paul Maritz, BoldIQ Board member. “Optimized operations are essential to company growth – in every industry. BoldIQ’s offering will empower companies to maximize their productivity, while simultaneously decreasing operating costs and increasing revenue.”

BoldIQ’s technology is currently used to significantly increase operational efficiencies. BoldIQ has helped its customers in complex business environments drive significant increases in productivity, decreases in operating costs and increases in their revenue-generating capacity.

“Paul’s decision to join our Board of Directors marks an exciting time for BoldIQ as we expand our cloud-based solutions to offer demand-driven customers an unparalleled decision-making suite of tools,” said Roei Ganzarski, president and CEO of BoldIQ. “Paul recognized the potential with his initial investment and will now be an integral part of our growth as our sophisticated resource scheduling software disrupts industries like transportation, aviation, healthcare and staffing.”