Manufacturing Giant Caterpillar Jumps Into Data Arena With Game-Changing Deals

Is manufacturing giant Caterpillar poised to take on Little Rock’s Acxiom, Experian and other data tech firms in the emerging area of artificial intelligence and predictive analytics?

In the past 30 days or so, the Peoria, Ill.-based manufacturing giant made two stunning announcements that caught the attention of the technology world.

On March 5, the farming and agri manufacturing behemoth announced it was making a minority investment in Uptake, a tiny Chicago startup that has only been in business for about 18 months.

Caterpillar, which has a 700-employee back loader manufacturing facility in North Little Rock, said it “will jointly develop an end-to-end platform for predictive diagnostics to help Caterpillar customers monitor and optimize their fleets more effectively.”

“Customers use our current technology for fleet monitoring and to track fuel efficiency, idle times, location and more,” said Chairman and CEO Caterpillar Doug Oberhelman. “Our existing solutions are effective, but it’s time we take it to the next level. This relationship will combine Caterpillar’s world-class product engineering and design expertise with Uptake’s software, application and data analytics expertise. As a result, we’ll be able to transform the quintillion bytes of incoming data we see every day into useful information we feed back to our customers for on-the-spot decisions and planning purposes to further reduce owning and operating costs.”

On Friday (April 10), Caterpillar made an even bigger announcement that it was jumping into the data game altogether with the formation of a new division called Analytics & Innovation or AI, which incidentally is synonymous in the data world with “artificial intelligence.”

Sounding like Acxiom or a Silicon Valley tech firm, Caterpillar said the division will bring together the people and resources that will foster a culture with innovation at the core, form a broad and connected analytics ecosystem and manage strategic third party relationships with providers like Uptake.

“We know that technology and information are the drivers in almost every industry including ours. We have to continue pushing our company to be innovative – to imagine, create, and embrace the new and the different, and to be disruptive in our own way,” said Rob Charter, Caterpillar group president for Customer & Dealer Support. “A huge opportunity for competitive advantage lies in the analytics and innovation space, and we have a unique opportunity to connect data from the broadest product line that cuts across multiple industries.”

Caterpillar said it will co-locate key employees with the Uptake team in Chicago to accelerate the work needed to create a platform that takes massive amounts of data, combines it with data science to understand patterns and quickly deploys information to save customers money, optimize performance and prevent unplanned downtime.

The world’s leading construction and mining manufacturer said it will also place resources in Silicon Valley and target seed money in a venture capital fund to “invest in emerging technologies that could further enhance Caterpillar’s product and service development.”

Last week, Talk Business & Politics interviewed Jake Hamann, president and CEO of One Fire Media, another Peoria-based startup that does Internet marketing and digital strategy consulting for Caterpillar.

To learn more about Caterpillar’s game-changing leap into data technology, click here.