IoT for lorries: BlackBerry Radar gets first major customer

You might never use another piece of BlackBerry hardware, but your car might - well, your fleet of lorries might.

BlackBerry Radar is the Canadian company's foray into IoT for transport, with sensors collecting the location of trailers and cargo, status of the trailer door, the temperature, humidity, and so on. The small black box can be installed on lorries or containers in 10 minutes, and gathers data every five minutes.

That "smart trailer" data is all chucked up in the cloud every 15 minutes where fleet operation managers, load planners and dispatchers can analyse it to help cut costs and more efficiently manage deliveries.

"Taking time, money and guesswork out of the supply chain is a top priority for leaders across the transportation and logistics industry,” said Derek Kuhn, senior vice president of IoT for BlackBerry, in a statement. “The current method of obtaining information about a trailer or intermodal container no longer works in today’s connected world, because this data is typically not real-time or updated frequently enough to make timely decisions."

The platform has its first major customer, Caravan Transport Group. “Running a fleet of ‘Smart Trailers’ has been a vision of ours for a while, but it wasn’t until we met with BlackBerry did we think it could come to fruition,” said John Iwaniura, president of the Caravan Group of Companies, in a statement.

Radar uses BlackBerry's QNX operating system, which the company is pushing as a platform for the IoT, hoping to breathe some life into its sales after failing to recover on smartphones.