Big news today: we have acquired Global Traffic Technologies (GTT), the company behind the market-leading priority control solution – Opticom. To help support this acquisition – and accelerate our ability to deliver new solutions to the market – we also announced that we’ve raised an investment in Miovision of C$260 million.
We’ve partnered with GTT for several years, first bringing Opticom to our TrafficLink solution, then beginning a hardware partnership where we provided our Miovision Core platform to support GTT’s priority control solution, which they sold as Opticom Core.
This acquisition is the next logical step in our relationship. It brings the team behind Opticom to Miovision to help us fully integrate it into our platform, enabling us to continue to develop and improve what is one of the best priority control solutions on the market.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Opticom, it provides priority control to support emergency responders and public transit. By providing green light priority, Opticom can reduce emergency response times by up to 25% and emergency vehicle crashes at the intersection by up to 70%. It also helps transit agencies provide more reliable service for riders. This solution is already installed at over 90,000 intersections across North America, with corresponding hardware in emergency and transit vehicles.
Our CEO, Kurtis McBride recorded a short video to share his thoughts on what this means for Miovision – and our customers.
For GTT’s existing customers: you will continue to enjoy the support you’ve always had. And, you now have access to a range of traffic management solutions, in some cases leveraging hardware you already have installed at the intersection. It’s everything you already love about Opticom – and more.
For Miovision customers – you now have access to an amazing priority control solution to improve the efficiency and safety of your emergency and transit services. It’s a win-win.
GTT is based in St. Paul, Minnesota and its 84 employees have joined Miovision and will continue to work from their office there. With recent US-based acquisitions and senior-level hires, we now have a presence in the US market – our largest – of over 100 people, including our President and CFO and a significant chunk of our sales staff. That brings us closer to our US customers and helps us better understand their evolving needs.
If you’ve been paying attention, you might notice that we’ve been adding to our capabilities through acquisitions over the last 18 months – adding Traffop (signal performance measures), Rapid Flow (adaptive signal control), MicroTraffic (safety analytics) and now GTT. What’s exciting is we can support these solutions with a single, powerful hardware platform: Miovision Core. And, we’re at work on a single software/data platform that can bring all these solutions together with Miovision’s existing solutions – and a range of solutions we aim to deliver in the future. It’s exciting work that we’ll have more to share about at the upcoming ITS America event at the end of April – visit us at booth #809.