In the competitive struggle to outfit U.S. fleets with trailer tracking, Terion has just established a beachhead in Qualcomm territory.

Truckload mega-fleet J.B. Hunt Transport, Lowell, Ark., has placed an order for 17,000 FleetView Trailer Monitoring Systems from Terion of Melbourne, Fla. Hunt, the second largest U.S. truckload carrier, operates a fleet of some 45,000 trailers and containers.
According to a joint announcement from Terion and Hunt, J.B. Hunt has been testing the FleetView system since July of 2000, and Wabash National Corp. has already installed more than 800 FleetView units on an order of new Wabash DuraPlate trailers for J.B. Hunt. The balance of J.B. Hunt's order will be installed throughout the remainder of the year.
The Hunt deal represents Terion's first large-scale incursion into a major fleet customer of Qualcomm. Hunt has long used Qualcomm's OmniTRACS system for driver communications. Terion's Mobile Messenger product competes with OmniTRACS, while Qualcomm markets a competing trailer tracking solution called TrailerTRACS.
Only last month, Qualcomm announced the largest single trailer-tracking sale to date, some 30,000 TrailerTRACS units to Swift Transportation of Pheonix, Ariz. According to Qualcomm, the total could rise to 40,000 units if Swift's merger with M.S. Carriers is completed. At the same time, Qualcomm announced that the nation's largest truckload carrier, Schneider National of Green Bay, Wis., had named Qualcomm its "provider of choice for trailer tracking solutions," though without a specific purchasing commitment.
This is the second major trailer-tracking agreement for J.B. Hunt. In July of 1999, the carrier announced it would outfit its fleet with the Vantage trailer-tracking system, which operated over the Orbcomm low-earth-orbit satellite system. However, financial difficulties at Orbcomm and Vantage led to a bankruptcy filing in September of last year.
"We looked at all of the systems that are currently available and found Terion's FleetView to be the only one that met our requirements for a feature rich solution with extensive service coverage, reliability, and ease of use," said Kirk Thompson, president and CEO at J.B.Hunt.
"Terion's ability to deliver the product to our roll-out schedule was also an important factor in our decision to go with the FleetView system."
J.B. Hunt is the largest publicly held truckload transportation company in North America with annual revenues of more than $2 billion.