If you click on “Transportation” on our homepage, you’ll see a photo of a line of Hummers.  Mark Tullio, (our director of marketing and communications) and I struggled over the caption that accompanies the photo.  My original suggestion was “Everyone coming home has a story to tell. Lantronix helps them tell it.”  However, we couldn’t figure out how to make a clean connection in this case that “coming home” meant vehicles returning to the US from Iraq or Afghanistan. In a recent edition of The New York Times, there was a picture of a large number of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles waiting in Iraq to make the trip to Kuwait to board a ship to return to the US.  The accompanying article was about the enormous logistics involved in repatriating all the US equipment currently in Iraq. The reason I bring this up is that Lantronix gives machines a voice and the ability to speak, and in some cases the ability to think and act.

For a moment, imagine all those MRAP’s or Hummers being driven on to a ship in Kuwait and as they board, Lantronix helps them tell their story efficiently, quietly and wirelessly to a computer database.  For example, “I’ve been running too hot lately, or, my reverse gear has been acting up, or, my oil level is low, or, my spare is missing, or, my radio needs to be upgraded, etc.” The information collected can then be communicated to maintenance depots in the US. Now imagine that dozens of ships with thousands of vehicles are returning to the US and you are a member of one of the maintenance teams receiving them. As difficult as your job is, it will be a made a little easier because your team knows the condition of the arriving vehicles. Weeks in advance of their arrival, your team has ordered the parts and fluids needed to restore the vehicles to fighting strength. Your team knows which vehicles need routine maintenance and which need more help.

When Lantronix products help vehicles tell their story in a military or commercial environment, the resulting savings in time, effort and cost can be significant.