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.”
Swarco has a major presence here at the ITS World Congress on two stands (D10 & E10) and will be focusing on the company’s integrated solutions capabilities in urban and interurban traffic management, parking and e-mobility and public transport. Swarco technology, including traffic controllers, LED signals, LED VMS, and LED street lights, will be featured within the Testfeld Telematik, the outdoor demo course taking place under real Vienna traffic conditions and showing the interaction of cooperative system
Moxa, the German producer of industrial automation products, will be showing a range of its products, including industrial Ethernet switches and industrial wireless AP devices with resilient self-healing Turbo Ring and Turbo Chain technology and Turbo Roaming, allowing ITS operators access to high performance wired or wireless Ethernet technology with good bandwidth. Other products include what Moxa describes as the world’s first serial device server for connecting legacy devices such as VMS.
Leading ITS software and systems integrator Open Roads Consulting has announced two key promotions: Tiger Harris is now Open Roads’ Director of Business Services; and James Knowlton is the firm’s new Director of ITS Operations. “We are thrilled to announce the promotions of Tiger and Jamie,” says Open Roads President Barbara Skiffington. “Tiger has outstanding knowledge of the ITS marketplace and over 20 years of experience developing and deploying ITS systems. We will be able to leverage his experience in
International Road Dynamics (IRD) is highlighting a deployment of its weigh-in-motion solution on the Stonecutters Bridge in Hong Kong, showing how the system is able to calculate vehicle weights to predict potential stresses in the roadway.