A new giant has been born in ITS, ready to deliver solutions right across the industry, from tolling and weigh-in-motion to enforcement and classification. Meet Chuck Myers, Quarterhill’s first CEO, and find out about his career history, his vision for the future and planned expansion in the world of AI
The ITS world’s newest big name is Quarterhill, a company that brings together a number of established, successful firms under one banner. And it’s on a stand bedecked with the company’s new logo, at a bustling Intertraffic Amsterdam, that I meet Chuck Myers, the man who is leading the new enterprise as CEO.
Myers is enthusiastic and friendly, but also direct and laser-focused – his acumen honed by over 25 years heading up large businesses, turning around struggling ones, and starting new ones that have gone on to become huge names, the most notable in transportation being TransCore.
“I’ve done a lot of things,” he says, recounting his journey from his early days in the defense industry to pioneering work on the world’s first automated vehicle identification (AVI) system (a predecessor to EZ Pass) at SAIC. Myers has always been at the forefront of innovation.
His experience in toll collection and traffic management led him to co-found TransCore (with Quarterhill’s current chairman Rusty Lewis) which grew into a major player. “We acquired another toll business, we acquired a traffic management business and rolled that together and grew that into a quite large business very quickly,” says Myers.
Entrepreneurship has been a constant thread in Myers’ career, with successful ventures identifying emerging trends ranging from telematics to wireless technology. “I started a telematics company called Network Fleet, which is now Verizon Telematics,” he says. More recently he has been involved in companies specializing in AI and face recognition.
Now, in his latest role at Quarterhill, Myers is poised to deliver ITS solutions of almost every type, as a one-stop shop for traffic managers around the world.
“The next step is really how we incorporate artificial intelligence… with convolutional neural networks and applying large language models and analytics to data”
How Quarterhill began
“Quarterhill was founded out of a company called WiLan, which was one of the original patent licensing firms,” Myers explains. “It started in the ’80s as a wireless technology company, building routers and switches. Then it decided it didn’t want to make hardware, so it licensed its patents for everybody else, and built a large company. But what happened over time is the patent business fell apart a bit because accounting rules changed, and you couldn’t spread your licenses out over time – you had to take all your payments at once. So it kind of messed up the business.”
These rule changes prompted the creation of Quarterhill as a holding company set up to diversify investments. After selling off WiLan last year, Quarterhill made a pivotal decision to become “a true, organic, one world ITS company,” as Myers puts it. The name was never intended initially to be the ITS brand, but after considering dozens of alternatives, it stuck. “It’s broad. It’s easy to say. Everybody can spell it, and it’s a dot com, so people remember it!” says Myers.
What drew Myers to Quarterhill was the opportunity to drive transformative change in the transportation space. “I love the transportation space. It’s not ever going to get smaller. It’s always growing. It’s desperately in need of new technology,” he says.
Myers firmly believes that Quarterhill’s diverse portfolio positions the company to lead this revolution. “The advantage I think Quarterhill has is we own a lot of virtual real estate,” he says, alluding to the company’s extensive intellectual property and market presence (see A New Family overleaf for the full list of Quarterhill’s acquisitions). “We’re uniquely positioned in that we can install cameras for enforcement and tie in weigh-in-motion with tolling and tie that in with commercial vehicle operations. So, I think we can be one of the first true companies to really integrate this all into one offering. We’re also integrating lidar and computer vision, thanks to the acquisition of Red Fox.”
An AI future
The next frontier, according to Myers, is enhancing Quarterhill’s existing products and services. “The next step is really how we incorporate artificial intelligence,” he says. “And there are really two sides to that. One is with convolutional neural networks and how we apply them to vision and things like that. The other side of it is that we’re processing billions of transactions a year. We want to apply large language models and analytics to data to help our customers. They get the data to collect the revenue, they get the data to write some tickets, but they don’t have a capability to do much else with the data. The idea is to be able to expand our offerings to our customers, who are craving this information. Until AI came along, this was a manual process.
“We are a clearinghouse for the interagency tolling group throughout the United States. There’s a huge need to process and move all that data,” adds Myers, who believes AI will enable insights like identifying optimal routes based on conditions.
After consolidating previously siloed companies under one structure, Myers says the new focus is on developing “the plan to grow it and start new implementations. We’re going to roadmap our AI implementation over the next year. We want to double the size of the business in the next three years. We want to be a leader in each of our markets.”
“There’s a huge need to process and move data… We’re going to roadmap our AI implementation over the next year”
This article was first published in the June 2024 edition of TTi magazine
