Samsara connects the world of physical operations to the cloud. Its Connected Operations Platform makes it easy for customers to access, analyze, and act upon IoT data from facilities, trucks, heavy equipment, and mobile devices. This visibility ultimately helps organizations improve their safety, efficiency, and sustainability. 

“While it was always Samsara’s goal to have an impact on the world of operations, we’ve evolved significantly over the past (almost) seven years. Our first product offered real-time GPS tracking for vehicles, and from there, we’ve expanded our platform to connect fleets, sites, and equipment. We serve tens of thousands of customers globally,” shared Kiren Sekar, chief product officer at Samsara.

Digging Deeper 

Work Truck interviewed Sekar to learn more about connected operations, current trends, and what’s next. Check out these interview excerpts: 

WT: Let’s discuss Samsara’s current approach to connected operations – why does this matter to truck fleet managers?

SEKAR: Commercial fleets are the backbone of physical operations, whether the fleet is in transportation and logistics, construction, energy, or government. We give these organizations a platform to manage their operations. We can help them improve customer service with real-time ETAs, use AI to help drivers stay safe, and reveal insights to reduce fuel consumption. 
Because of our Connected Operations approach, our platform doesn’t stop at the truck — customers can extend Samsara to their assets and equipment, warehouses, and facilities. 

WT: What differentiates your technology from other options?

SEKAR: Samsara stands out from other solutions for a few reasons. 

First, our plug-and-play approach makes us easy to deploy - customers can start using the system in an afternoon and often see value within days. 

Second is the breadth of our solution, which connects the dots across an entire operations department rather than solving a single problem. And third, as a leader in Connected Operations, we have a tremendous scale of data in our cloud, which unlocks new capabilities we can deliver for our customers. 

We’re working with 2 trillion data points a year from over a million connected devices. For example, with this data, we can build benchmarks for our customers to see how they compare to similar operators and where they can improve. Another example is we use the data to train our AI-based safety algorithms, enabling customers to create tailored safe-driver rewards programs.

WT: What trends do you see customers excited about right now?

SEKAR: One is definitely data. As digital transformation accelerates across the industrial sector, this often leads to an increased volume of data coming from various sources. Our customers are eager to take advantage of this data and make sense of it, so we hear them asking how to connect more data points from across their organization to our platform. 

Another is the desire for mobile-first software workflows to drive efficiency. For many of our customers, their technology must be easy and intuitive to optimize daily tasks; otherwise, it can be more cumbersome than helpful. 

We look forward to building upon some of the tailored driver workflows we launched last year and working alongside our customers to uncover new use cases for this kind of technology. 

Lastly is, of course, AI. It’s still in the early days when you think about how this technology can enable us to work more safely and efficiently, and we look forward to unlocking more of this potential. 

WT: Can you share a little bit about what's next for Samsara?

SEKAR: We’re still at the beginning of a multi-decade journey regarding the solutions we want to build and the impact we want to have in the world of physical operations. 

We’re excited to continue building products, partnerships, and integrations to meet the demands of our customers and get additional data and insights into our platform they can act upon.