Quipment
Challenges
In 2002, the two young founders of Quipment wanted to bring a mobile computing solution to the taxi industry in the Netherlands. What they needed was a stable mobile computing platform to make it happen, so they travelled from the Netherlands to London, England, to meet with Tamara Porter, Mentor Engineering's Business Development Manager. "They were two guys who were smart and very motivated to bring a mobile taxi solution to Europe," says Tamara.
Solution
Quipment became a Mentor OEM/Developer Program Partner following that initial meeting. Today, Mentor Ranger® is their in-vehicle computer of choice for their client's vehicles. They white label Ranger, write their own mobile software and management software programs, and provide full service installation and maintenance. Their mobile computing/dispatch solution is called Qate.
To get their product to market faster, Quipment leveraged Mentor's years of experience by using the Ranger Software Developers Kit (SDK) to write software used on Ranger. The SDK provides a versatile development environment, and contains tools that simplify deployment, and speed development time for an accelerated time to market for the end solution. Quipment also uses a Mentor XGate middleware server to handle the sending and receiving of all their clients' messages, of which there are 20 to 30 each second.
More recently, Quipment has adapted Mentor's XMobile Manager (XMM) over-the-air programming software so they are able to write their own XMM functionality for easy debugging and diagnostics.
Results
In six short years, Quipment has completely transformed a technically lagging industry in the Netherlands and expanded their offering from just equipment, to providing a highly functional mobile computing solution complete with full service and support. Thousands of Rangers have been distributed, with their success showing no signs of slowing.
But, Quipment isn't the only one to benefit from this partnership, as Chris Pettigrew, Product Specialist at Mentor, explains: "With their exacting requirements and focus on delivering excellent mobile computing solutions, Quipment worked with Mentor's developers and helped to hone every piece of functionality Ranger offers—from the taximeter to voice communication—and every part of the SDK. The market in Europe tends to be at the forefront of innovation, so we were able to borrow from that experience to make improvements to the technology here at home."
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The advantage of Ranger is that it's a proven, stable platform, with all the functionality we need, so we know it will work as expected. That takes away a lot of the headache when bringing our product to market. 
