OCTO Telematics, a provider of IoT and telematics solutions for insurance carriers, automotive companies, and mobility providers, has acquired the entire share capital of Nebula Systems.
Nebula specialises in the development of advanced cloud technologies for the automotive and connected car industries. This means that its proprietary technologies are now available to make vehicle systems and data more accessible. With the integration of Nebula’s solution into the OCTO Intelligent Mobility solution, vehicle health, status and operations can be monitored, analysed, diagnosed and maintained, faster and more effectively than ever before with a proprietary fully cloud-based vehicle diagnostics and data platform.
With this OCTO continues its investment strategy in companies with high technological value, pursuing continuous portfolio innovation and market leadership. The company had acquired of the usage-based insurance (UBI) assets of Willis Towers Watson in October, 2017. This acquisition included Willis Towers Watson’s DriveAbility solution and the DriveAbility Marketplace.
The acquisitions are in response to the increasing demand for vehicle usage data analysis tools, with advantages for insurance, automotive and mobility companies with its increasingly integrated and complete offering. Modern cars are full of sensors that generate huge amounts of valuable data that can be used to enhance both the driver and fleet manager experience. The vast majority of this data is related to OEM Electronic Control Unit (ECU), protocol and CAN bus which are difficult for the aftermarket to access.
The Nebula Systems diagnostic cloud solution is based on an integrated circuit and a suite of vehicle data analysis software applications in order to better respond to the increased complexity. An integrated circuit, developed with proprietary technology, claims to grant deep access to OEM level data. Vehicle telematics can therefore benefit from combining this telematics chipset with proprietary analysis software, which gives OCTO the ultimate flexibility and ease of access to OEM vehicle data by using a unique VIN-specific configuration file that contains the instructions to read Parameter ID (PID) sets from any OEM ECU on virtually any car. This technology uniquely combines the proprietary chipset and a cloud-based VIN interpreter and configuration files builder to fully access all the ECUs and thousands of PIDs a vehicle may have.
With this acquisition, the Nebula technology will be integrated in the standard OCTO offering. Furthermore, all OCTO telematics devices will integrate these capabilities, allowing OCTO solutions full access to all OEM ECUs and to use diagnostic trouble codes and Parameter IDs for the benefit of both drivers and fleet managers. The combination of these benefits will have a substantial impact on mobility management costs for fleet managers using the Fleet Telematics solution.
Source: OCTO
