Pilotfish is attending Busworld together with Voith. Pilotfish CEO, Tomas Gabinus, expects attention regarding the changing market situation. “One of the most central things going on right now is the open ITxPT architecture, which fundamentally changes the market behaviour of the involved parties. It frees every actor to focus on what they are best at – e.g. video suppliers focus on what they do, passenger counting on what they do etc. as opposed to the previous situation where some actors tried to do it all with moderate success,“ says Tomas Gabinus.
As the CEO of one of Europe’s leading providers of on-board IT systems and applications, Tomas Gabinus has a thorough insight into the ongoing process of digitalization in public transport. One of the central concepts is modularization. “It means that you divide the system into different functions, so you can replace parts of it without changing the complete system. For example, you can choose one passenger counting system supplier and another for ticketing. We can add and remove whichever suppliers we want in the system. Previously, this was not possible,” Tomas Gabinus says. He continues: “An open ecosystem is what has made all markets take off, whether it be mobile phones or computers. I very much believe this is the case for public transport as well.”
Part from broader discussions about the changing market, Tomas Gabinus expects to see a lot of discussions in three specific areas. The first area is the digitalized workforce, which doesn’t mean to replace staff with robots, but to provide the workforce with valuable tools, simplifying their day-to-day work and improving quality.
The second area is Pilotfish cooperation with Voith regarding making more vehicle information available for analyzing and diagnostics. Pilotfish already, for example, provides remote download of tachograph- and driver card data, which saves time and money for many operators. Together with Voith, Pilotfish is now developing remote download of additional information from the vehicles, for example in connection with the Voith DIWA automatic transmission. Together with Pilotfish, it can be turned into a major benefit for fleet operators in the age of intelligent data networking
The third focus area is electric vehicles in connection to Pilotfish open digitalization platform. This area is also important to Voith. Last year, they introduced a fully electrical drive system for city buses.
Tomas Gabinus looks forward to attend Busworld, and he doesn’t fear the competition, but rather, as the pioneer for open and standardized systems he is, he appreciates their help. “We’ve got the whole world as a playing field, and to reach out, we welcome help from our competitors. Together, we can manage to inform and open up markets all over the world to adapt to new, effective solutions. It is not a zero-sum game. Rather the opposite. The more and better solutions reaching the market, the faster the knowledge will grow, and the more possibilities open up. Everyone wins,” Tomas Gabinus concludes.