Borg Knows How Your Fleet Thinks

Company: Borg Solutions

Headquarters: Austin, Tex.

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: Borg Fleet

Year Founded: 2003

Number of Channel Partners: Seven in the U.S.

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Borg Solutions fleet management software makes life easier for industries that are typically IT-shy but have crucial need for the cost savings provided by business process solutions.

The Lowdown: Necessity's the mother of invention, as the saying goes, and for Chris and Michelle Borg, husband and wife, it was necessity that led to the creation of Borg Solutions, the fleet management software company they founded six years ago.

At the time, Chris was a software developer working on business process solutions, and Michelle was managing a family-owned construction company.

Borg Fleet

"I was attempting to put my arms around fleet management, and I was having trouble controlling cost and figuring out where everything was. All of our logs were on paper or on a lot of different Excel spreadsheets," she said. "Chris and I searched for software, and some offered inventory and some offered cost analysis and some asset trackers only resided with GPS companies. We needed something that would do everything and decided there was nothing to bridge the gap, so we decided to create our own product."

Borg's flagship software is the Web-based Borg Fleet, which offers real-time data analytics for both fleet management and cost analysis (Its companion product, Borg GPS, is an asset tracking platform).

Borg Fleet is designed to help the types of companies Michelle notes are "always laggards" when it comes to IT: construction, oil and gas, fleet rental and transportation companies, as well as some government agencies.

"It can be a huge burden for them," she said. "IT is usually something that's outsourced, and then it's a burden for them to have to call somebody to come out and fix something. It's a case of too many fingers in the same pie, so we wanted to take a lot of the scariness out of tech for these industries. A lot of the stuff is done for them."

The Borgs built out OEM relationships, partnerships with GPS companies, and also a reseller channel built on enterprise-oriented VARs who can integrate telematics and maintenance software into packaged solutions. Borg Fleet is also available in seven languages, overcoming another hurdle -- translation -- Michelle says is common to the types of industries and multiethnic workforces Borg serves.

According to Chris, a longtime software developer who in the past has worked for Trilogy and the Dell-owned MessageOne, Borg will continue to scale its software with additional features, including fuel management, more reporting, and analyzing different maintenance strategies to help industry end users cut costs. The core of the product, he says, is how it provides artificial intelligence to fleet management.

"They sign in and start using it, and the system learns about how they behave," Chris said. "We want it to provide a service to them as much as anything else, and create an ecosystem where customers and dealers can sustain each other."