AGCO Corporation (NYSE:AGCO), a world-leading manufacturer and distributor of agricultural equipment, announces feature upgrades for its AgCommand® telemetry product and Fuse® Connected Services offering. The new features will allow growers to optimize their farming operations through broader connectivity and improved support and diagnostics.
First available to customers in 2010, AGCO's best-in-class telemetry technology, AgCommand, was redesigned in 2015 to power the newly launched Fuse Connected Services. Fuse Connected Services enables customers and dealers to better manage farm fleets through remote monitoring and streamlined service and maintenance management. Machine data remotely viewed and analyzed through AgCommand can be used to develop insights and help identify operator training opportunities to increase operator efficiency and minimize costs by helping growers avoid unnecessary service appointments.
AGCO will be adding enhanced remote support capabilities, which will enable dealers and customers to more quickly identify and resolve machine and operational issues in near real-time, reducing downtime in the field. The AgCommand update will also bring 100% geographic coverage to customers with connected AGCO machines through the Iridium® satellite network, the world's largest, and only fully global, commercial constellation. This brings AGCO customers the broadest, most reliable connectivity in the industry by allowing them to maintain access to the back office when there is no cellular coverage. This means that the flow of data will continue while in remote areas or areas compromised by unreliable terrestrial communications because machines will be connected through fully global satellite coverage.
"Bringing our customers products and services that optimize their farm operation is our top priority," says Eric Hansotia, Senior Vice President, Global Crop Cycle, Advanced Technology Solutions and Dealer Technical Support at AGCO . "These new AgCommand features add an exciting, new level of support for our customers leveraging Fuse Connected Services packages from AGCO dealers."
These new services are enabled by AgCommand and the new AGCO Connectivity Module (ACM), connectivity hardware developed through AGCO's joint venture with Appareo Systems, Intelligent Agricultural Solutions, LLC (IAS). Announced in November 2014 , the mission of IAS is to enable breakthrough agricultural innovations for creating a more optimized farm. The joint venture, which presents a unique funding mechanism and structure to quickly drive new, creative technologies, is the flagship of AGCO's ever-growing Fuse open partnering model, which also seeks to enable data connections with a range of other customer-preferred and trusted service providers.
"Appareo's work in the agriculture space, and in particular through our joint venture with AGCO , is focused on the connected machine," says Barry Batcheller, Chairman and CEO at Appareo Systems. "The benefits the gateway device brings to growers is unparalleled. It truly opens the door for entirely new levels of connectivity and productivity."
These new capabilities of AgCommand and Fuse Connected Services will be available on select machines in some North American, European and Asia Pacific markets in early 2017.
Source : AGCO