Connexion Media – which specialises in software apps and services for vehicles – has announced it will expand one of its leading IT programs – Flex – into the United States, after signing up with an American carmaker.

The Flex IT program was launched in March and allows fleet (or vehicle) owners to track a number of indicators including vehicle geopositioning, speed, fuel consumption, performance and driver behaviour. It stores and sends information to a database every 30 seconds, which is deciphered and accessible to owners via the web.

Neos Kosmos spoke to Connexion’s CEO George Parthimos, who said the company endured structural changes to expand from its initial 25,000 users to an estimated one million.

“We kind of felt an entry level baseline or a basic infrastructure level would be enough for what we expected after we launched in March.

“[But] in May we announced a deal with a major US based automaker and that allowed for the Flex product to be rebranded and sold across 4000 dealers across the US and we kind of revisited and said well we’re going to run out of capacity really quickly and if we need to make the move we need to make it now.”

Connexion’s original model was targeted to small businesses with up to 50 vehicles, but Parthimos said a complete redesign of the company’s infrastructure was required, necessitating a $2 million cash injection, which will allow real time data to be received in greater volumes.

“If you have a million cars that are sending messages to your servers every 30 seconds, those messages have to be captured by your servers, stored in your database and then they’re sliced and diced to make sense of your data and presented in a format that the webportal can understand.

“The infrastructure we’ve built, we’re talking enterprise grade, it’s something that even the largest fleet operators use.”

Connexion expects to launch its rebranded model in December and will concentrate on its existing agreements with the US automaker, before considering expanding into Europe.