Greyhound Lines, the largest operator of intercity bus services across North America, serves more than 3,100 destinations with 16,000 daily departures. The challenge for Greyhound Lines lies in monitoring the buses for safety, service and security—a humungous task indeed. The trick is to use technology to monitor mileage between stops and starts, battery conditions, driving speed, panic situation if any and verifying if it’s an assigned driver for a particular route.

Greyhound has been using wireless communications equipment to track the vehicles and capture the required para-meters.

Providing solution to Greyhound is a little known company in Fremont, CA—Ayantra. The company develops wireless and wireline telemetry platforms that enable remote monitoring of fixed and mobile assets. In a world where corporate assets and people are spread across a wide geography, it has become critical to stay connected with resources and people—anytime and anywhere. Ayantra’s wireless and Web enabled telemetry solutions promise productivity enhancement by enabling access to remote assets.

Over the years, Ayantra has demonstrated its wireless expertise by shipping more than 10,000 cellular units and having a deployment of over 100,000 spread spectrum radios for various clients including HP, Magtek, Greyhound, Teletrac, Omega, Hertz, Lawrence Tractor, RDO, Coastline Equipment, Horizon and others.

Ayantra has built a Universal Gateway Platform that transforms a physical domain or an object to IP. The properties and the behavior of physical objects are captured through sensing devices and sent across to Ayantra’s Gateway. This gateway then communicates with applications via an IP cloud to monitor and manage the tasks required.

Ayantra’s Gateway has the ability to monitor and control all aspects of any physical object. For example, a lake can be monitored for contaminations where a slightest increase or decrease in chemical balance can set off an alarm and shut off the main water supply valve. “This paradigm shift opens the door to a $90 billion market opportunity in the U.S. in segments such as industrial, business, homes and transportation,” says Ashok Teckchandani, Founder, Chairman and CEO.

Teckchandani and his team have worked towards providing a common link where each and every physical entity can be controlled and managed globally. “Sensor devices currently used within any control system are dissimilar with no common communication between systems. In addition, these control systems are limited to industrial applications, where each application is unique with no common link,” says Teckchandani.

What’s unique about Ayantra’s gateway platform is that it can be easily customized to suit any application. Right now Ayantra is selling customized solutions. With the release of a new version of the platform, expected in 2006, companies will be able to easily build solutions. This, Teckchandani believes, will allow the market to scale rapidly. Ayantra’s platform is flexible across verticals—industrial, construction or agricultural applications.
For instance, Ayantra’s platform can be used for agricultural purposes too. Monitoring of a farm field pump for fuel level, emergency shutdowns, battery voltage, water supply and maintenance is facilitated on this platform.

Ayantra has an impressive clientele. “We have installed over 5,500 gateways over a period of 18 months,” says Teckchandani.

Fueling Growth
Founded in 1995, Ayantra has bootstrapped itself so far. The company has self-funded the entire development to commercialization of its product. Ayantra boasts of achieving profitability with a healthy bottom-line. “However, to realize the full potential of our product line and growth potential we are planning to bring in $3 to $5 million first round investment to grow the company to $85 million by 2010,” says Teckchandani.

Ayantra’s road to profitability has been a decade-long patient hard work. Teckchandani founded Ayantra as an outsource design and manufacturing organization. Its first project was for Hewlett-Packard to design firmware and RF communication for parcel scanners, which HP developed for Federal Express. The company went on to develop data communications (wireless and wireline) solutions for many OEM clients.

After gaining a wealth of experience in GPS, RF and Cellular technologies, the company developed its own gateway platform to address and open up a new market segment—transforming the physical world to IP. As a progression, for Ayantra this was a logical next step. In 2005, the company rolled out its telemetry product. Soon, various market segments opened the door to endless applications where Ayantra’s Gateway fitted well.
Teckchandani has demonstrated his competence and ability to combine the knowledge about the physical world in unique ways.

With a Masters in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi and an MBA from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai, India. Teckchandani knows what it takes to build companies. In 1989, he founded Adtech Microsystems, which developed custom data communication products for OEM customers. In 1994, Adtech was acquired by a public company. Prior to Adtech, Teckchandani started a company in India to develop locks to prevent unauthorized long distance calls from the phone.

In his third entrepreneurial stint, Teckchandani has proved his mettle by taking a product company to profitability without raising any money from the investors. The steam hasn’t died yet. With infusion of additional funds, Teckchandani will take Ayantra to newer heights.