As visitors to the Q-Free booth at the ITS World Congress Detroit will see, the company has transformed its portfolio, shifting from a predominant focus on tolling to cover all aspects of road operations – financing, condition monitoring, real-time management and emerging cooperative ITS applications.
September 7, 2014
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Transforming the portfolio: Jenny Simonsen of Q-Free
As visitors to the 108 Q-Free booth at the ITS World Congress Detroit will see, the company has transformed its portfolio, shifting from a predominant focus on tolling to cover all aspects of road operations – financing, condition monitoring, real-time management and emerging cooperative ITS applications.
With the event being staged in Detroit, it provides Q-Free with an opportunity to highlight its appreciable presence in the North American market. Recently it acquired 5660 Open Roads Consulting, a specialist in advanced transportation management and traveller information systems that operates mission-critical traffic systems and undertakes video-based surveillance of critical assets in 30 states across the US.
Previously, Q-Free bought 7045 TCS International, a US-based, international supplier of advanced parking guidance systems. Meanwhile, Dacolian USA, another Q-Free group company, is North America’s major supplier of automatic number plate recognition and vehicle signature recognition image processing software.
Nevertheless, says Thomas Falck, CEO, these developments have to be considered in an international context: “The North American region will play an increasing part in our future but it is the international nature of our business which remains one of our core strengths. We will be keen to demonstrate at the 6456 ITS World Congress that with offices around the world, we have a huge range of talent and experience on which to draw. This means we can create solutions which benefit from the best of global practice but which, nevertheless, are closely tailored to local needs.”
Traficon is bringing some exciting new technologies to the ITS World Congress and two of them are of particular note. Earlier this year, the company acquired Sumit, a provider of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology. Traficon has been working ever since to incorporate the Sumit technology into its own portfolio and visitors to its stand will see the result – Eye-D, a dedicated Traficon camera product for intersection enforcement. The other major innovation at Traficon’s stand is the new VIP-
Finnish company Noptel plans to highlight its laser distance sensors used for traffic control at the World Congress. It will particularly be focusing on its Speeder X1 laser radar, which determines vehicle speed as well as its height and length.
Kapsch has added extensive advanced traffic management system (ATMS) expertise to its portfolio by acquiring US company Transdyn. The move matches with the aim of becoming a major global presence in the inter-urban traffic management sector, says Peter Ummenhofer, Kapsch’s head of ITS Business Unit: “Recognising that there were already very mature and capable ATMS solutions out there, we decided to look at what was already available.
PIPS Technology has rebranded its successful Spike camera range as the ‘Spike Planets'. Visitors to the ITS World Congress will be able to see new products in the range, including Spike Venus, Spike Neptune (integrated ANPR cameras) and Spike Helios (an off axis Illuminator). The latest addition to the range is the Spike Saturn, an integrated ANPR camera designed to cover three UK lanes of traffic.
