Sensolus NV and Alps Alpine Europe GmbH have signed a partnership agreement for mass-market IoT tracking solutions, following the increasing rollout of low-power cellular standards (NBIoT / LTE-m). Both players come with many years of dedicated experience in the segment and are combining their forces to offer a cost effective, reliable, and scalable solution for companies that want to locate, digitize and manage non-powered assets in high volumes with the goal of optimizing their logistics and supply chain processes.
Alps Alpine brings decennia of know-how in hardware development and cost effective manufacturing for global supply, including its rich experience in low-power tracking technology. Sensolus, with its industry-leading software (embedded and cloud applications), brings many years of field experience in life-cycle device management for low-power IoT devices combined with specific integrations and supply chain applications for industry.
The collaboration of the two specialists in the field of IoT asset tracking includes the following agreements:
Sensolus empowers and integrates the mass-market ready tracker from Alps Alpine
Alps Alpine Europe has equipped more than one million dollies, trollies, and containers with low-power, cost-effective IoT trackers – including at DHL – in less than three years. The tracker is highly reliable, has a battery life of up to seven years, installs itself in under a minute, and is developed for mass production and global supply.
Within the cooperation, Sensolus contributes its know-how to upgrade the tracker and its future variants to the low-power cellular network NB-IoT and LTE-m (as part of the 4G/5G standard), including its experience on remote management, diagnostics and life-cycle management. With this cooperation, Sensolus integrates these Alps Alpine produced trackers as standard in its offering to all its 200 industrial customers and more than 50 Value Added Resellers (VARs).
Alps Alpine Europe integrates and resells the Sensolus software
Alps Alpine Europe has selected the Sensolus platform for the life-cycle management of its next generation of trackers on low-power cellular communication (NBIoT/LTE-m). In addition, Alps Alpine Europe is Value Added Reseller (VAR) of Sensolus’ cloud-based platform and applications, specialized for tracking and digitizing non-powered assets. As Sensolus’ VAR, Alps Alpine moves from being a hardware supplier to a service provider with a focus on providing recurring services to its customer base.
Sensolus selects Alps Alpine Ireland for European mass-production
Within the cooperation, Sensolus intensifies its cooperation with the manufacturing department of Alps Alpine in Europe (located in Ireland). More specially, Sensolus selects Alps Alpine Ireland to ramp-up the production to mass volumes of the next generation of trackers in Europe.
“Alps Alpine is a strategically important partner for Sensolus,” Kristoff van Rattinghe, CEO and co-founder of Sensolus, is convinced. “As a group, Alps Alpine is very experienced as a manufacturer. They have the power to scale fast and the structure in place for global supply and handling. In addition, they have a strong commercial footprint on all continents. In this cooperation, our customers will benefit from the power and maturity of a global manufacturer, while we can guarantee our Sensolus key recipe of lifetime reliability and proven supply chain insights and improvements”.
“Sensolus adds an essential piece of the puzzle to our existing tracking hardware portfolio,” says Ahmed Abdelhalim, Business Unit Lead Industrial IoT at Alps Alpine Europe, summarizing the benefits of the cooperation. “It is our vision to make our scalable tracking hardware even more successful by adding the Sensolus Platform. It creates a seamless connection from our trackers out in the world into the corresponding business processes of our customers,
“Our companies have already worked well together in the past – for example, in the development of specific tracker features. But the current agreement goes well beyond that and comes at exactly the right time: IoT tracking solutions have now reached the required adoption maturity in the industry. The need is clear, the value is proven and has been accelerated by C19 supply chain disruptions, price inflations and the request to use more efficiently the recyclable returnable packaging,
“Through this intensified cooperation of Alps Alpine Europe and Sensolus, both companies strengthen their respective portfolios and business models and make it easier for companies of various sizes and industries to enter the world of powerful and affordable IoT tracking. Together, we are making IoT tracking mass-market ready on an international stage, thus enriching the global market”, Kristoff van Rattinghe concludes.
