Freight-matching service provider DAT will be exiting the electronic logging device (ELD) market. The announcement was made just several months after entering with the small-fleet/owner-operator-focused InView product, said Product Vice President Greg Sikes in a Monday briefing with CCJ’s sister publication Overdrive.
Existing customers of the InView electronic hours of service software and hardware continue be be supported in the short term, Sikes says, but DAT, longer-term, will work to move customers “over to somebody who wants to be in the business” of providing hours-of-service compliance tools.
Sikes and company have seen what he calls a “race to the bottom” among ELD vendors/service providers in pricing for their products. Sikes foresees eventual “commoditization” of the market for ELDs, not a market in which he sees DAT excelling long-term with specialized service.
“The reality,” Sikes says, “is that we looked at it, and at the end of the day, we said, ‘there’s not really a lot of profit opportunity’” in the business of ELDs long-term. “There are better ways that we can serve the customers that we have.”
Sikes and DAT saw potential value in providing an ELD device/service in the “location-based information on the carriers, their trucks, and capacity,” information that could be used to “better serve them” with detailed data on lanes, load opportunities and more. Likewise, such information might bolster DAT’s capacity information served to brokers — “where capacity’s already available in the United States.”
You can read more about the announcement and where DAT is focusing its new product development by reading the original story written by Todd Dills here.
Original Source: https://www.ccjdigital.com/freight-matching-provider-dat-to-exit-eld-market/