A relatively new player in the fleet management space is French company Hiboo, which is a mixed fleet data platform. IM Editorial Director Paul Moore met with Louis Petros, Hiboo Head of Alliances and Partnerships at bauma 2025 in Munich.
Petros said: “What Hiboo does, and what I think we do very well, is that we focus on a very operational problem that people have whenever they are running machines in construction, mining and quarrying. And that is, they have operational costs to optimise and therefore they need to have all the data at the same place – to be able to better manage cycles and maintenance and to see all the fault codes. But this is easier said than done as the inherent complexity of the market is that you are dealing with data from multiple equipment OEMs – Caterpillar, Komatsu, Volvo, Hitachi and many others across your fleet whether we are talking about trucks, excavators, wheel loaders or other machines.”
He adds: “Then you might also have light vehicles, or even rockbreaker units that also need to be connected. So there a very strong industry need for a brand-agnostic, mixed fleet platform. Hiboo addresses this operational problem directly, allowing users to have a range of benefits including optimising idling, managing fuel costs, and generally managing the operation and site more efficiently. You don’t have to focus on all the individual brands separately and you don’t have to put a new device on everything. Simplicity is a kind of revolution, actually.”
How does Hiboo do this? The starting point of its value journey is that Hiboo harmonises all of the telematics data as it is already provided by the OEMs without using any additional hardware. Even the positioning data is also already there from OEM systems. “When you buy a new machine you get the key to the machine but also the API key, which gives you the data from that machine when it is being used, which includes usage hours, fuel, idling, geolocation, payload etc. We use what is already there to populate Hiboo and then you can use our platform to create different working zones, monitoring your idling and fuel, keep track of alerts and fault codes. We solve the client problem but also the OEM problem – as we are getting more value from their data by putting it into a software system that brings more benefits to the end customer. We also help companies whether they are contractors, mining companies, whoever, to access data from their rental equipment partners as well.”
The rental companies can use Hiboo to share their data with the client, again bringing more value. So how does Hiboo get the OEM data into its platform? “We use the OEM hardware, and there are two ways – either the machine is connected natively by Caterpillar, for example, and that data goes into a Caterpillar cloud that is queried by our system. Or the machine is not yet connected and the customer has bought some other hardware – we then integrate the hardware with the OEM data and then bring the data that way into Hiboo. If the machine is already connected, you also go into Hiboo and put in all the connection passwords for all of your OEMs.”
So once the data is in Hiboo what does Hiboo do with it? “We correct and harmonise everything using the same parameters, as often these differ for things like fault codes and idling between different OEMs. We have done this already for over 120 OEMs. We put everything into daily data and then the customer can choose their alerts, build their zones and start working on their fleet through a visual interface. Within that interface, you can also import data that is shared with you, for example in the case of the rental equipment. There is no point in only having data from the machines you own and not the machines you rent. Hiboo is a truly open ecosystem, as whatever the brand or hardware, the data can come in. It also means that instead of dealing with 90 APIs, with Hiboo you are now only dealing with one – and then you can take our API and push that single data platform into other systems you may have like quarry or environmental management or CRM or ERP or whatever.”
Are there not problems where some OEMs don’t want to share their data with a system like Hiboo? “We haven’t run into that problem so far – we all have a common interest, which is building value for the end customer. A world where software is closed is not one people want to live in anymore. There may be situations where the customer chooses to use some specific types insights directly from the OEM software but to use Hiboo for everything else. Overall, the data needs to flow where it is needed for the end customer. So far we have had very positive relationships with all of the OEMs we have dealt with. In some cases we have also provided technology through the OEMs who want to provide a brand agnostic solution to their customer.”
Today there are 150,000 machines connected to Hiboo across 90 different countries – mainly in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. So far in extraction it mainly involves quarrying sites, but mining is very much a target market and an area the company is focussing on. In addition, some of the growth regions, like Turkey, have many equipment OEMs that are not yet connected with a mixed fleet platform, and so Hiboo can help mines and quarries in those areas bring those machines into one system along with the data from the global OEMs.
Hiboo was one of the first to aggregate data from multiple OEMs and remains one of the most successful in the market to work in this way. In terms of how many data sources it has and how many OEMs are represented, Hiboo says it has a leading position. Also relevant to mining is that Hiboo can also integrate not just machine OEM data, but also sources like engine health systems, TPMS, and the already mentioned hydraulic rock breaker data. Hiboo is sold on the market both directly and via dealer partners such as Halomec in the UK.