Plotting the Course for Trimble Transportation: A Q&A with Senior Vice President Ron Bisio

The transportation industry is incredibly dynamic and ever-changing – making it crucial to stay ahead of the technology curve, while staying true to the industry’s day-to-day needs and optimizing solutions to provide the greatest possible return on investment.

This challenge is one that Trimble Transportation senior vice president Ron Bisio is up for tackling. Ron has more than 25 years of experience in technology leadership across a variety of industries, and made a big splash at Trimble’s 2022 Insight Tech Conference + Expo with just one simple message: “We will go faster.”

We caught up with Ron recently to pick his brain on what he’s been hearing from customers, his main areas of focus, and where Trimble Transportation is headed.

Tell us a little bit about your background, including your more than 25 years with Trimble.

My educational background is in cartography and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and after a short three-year stint at Esri I joined Trimble as a product manager for our GPS mapping systems. I’ve had a bunch of different roles over the years, including leading the Mapping & GIS product marketing organization and serving as director of sales for our aerial and mobile mapping systems. Throughout my time at Trimble, I’ve been really fortunate to lead teams and do work in more than 40 countries!

I frequently joke that I made the mistake of leaving Trimble back in 2000 to work at an internet start-up that provided maps and driving directions to companies like FedEx, Starbucks and Toyota. Fortunately, I figured things out and rejoined Trimble in 2003. Microsoft, one of Trimble’s biggest partners, ended up buying that start-up, so everything comes around in the end.

In 2011, I started Trimble’s Rail division, and had a great time learning a completely new industry (not for the last time), and in 2015, I was asked to lead the Geospatial sector. I’m still involved with the Geospatial sector, but my primary focus since last summer has been leading the Transportation sector. I am again having a great time working with a whole new team of impressive people, while learning all about a new industry.

What’s your favorite part of your job as senior vice president?

I really enjoy this team. I am fortunate to work with an amazing team of leaders in the Transportation sector – they’re really passionate about what they’re doing. So one thing I enjoy the most is going to visit a customer with the team – sitting with them and figuring out how we can solve their problems and address their needs.

And I really enjoy seeing and experiencing our customers’ businesses – it helps me put together the pieces with other technologies within Trimble that could someday apply to their organization – whether that’s enabling autonomous technology or something else, it’s great to look into their operations to see how we could work together to improve things.

What are your key priorities as leader of Trimble’s Transportation sector?

There are so many ideas and opportunities, it’s hard to pick just a few!

One of my main priorities is enhancing and continuing to build upon our customer-centric approach. We truly want our customers to succeed and are laser-focused on helping make that happen. To get a better sense of where our customers are at and how we can best support them, I have visited more than a dozen customers since last summer! It’s a lot of time on the road, but I really enjoy it.

Additionally, my goal is to connect the entire transportation ecosystem to create the connected supply chain. We’ve heard from all corners of the sector the need to be a neutral partner to all industry players – and we’re making that a reality through the agnostic Trimble Transportation Cloud, which provides reliability and best-in-class cybersecurity for product integrations not only between our own solutions but with those from competing tech providers.

We’ve heard the desire from our customers for our solutions to be even more fully connected and integrated between each other – which is part of our “Better Together” mindset. Whether you’re a customer using our Mobility, Enterprise or Maps solutions, we want to continue building up cross-sector opportunities to better align our solutions to address key industry challenges.

From there, I will be focusing on supporting our sales, customer support and product teams on their initiatives to address customer concerns and identify opportunities that benefit both our customers and Trimble. We want to be more than just a vendor: our aim is to be a trusted advisor and partner.

How does Trimble Transportation fit into Trimble’s broader strategy?

Trimble is unique in that we provide technology solutions to some of the most important industries that are responsible for improving all of our lives.

Trimble’s Agriculture solutions help grow the food that feeds the planet; our Construction solutions are used to build the infrastructure we travel across and buildings that we live and work in; our Geospatial solutions are used to help manage much of the critical infrastructure on the planet, including utilities, forests, and pipelines. And the Transportation industry—and our solutions—play a critical role in moving what we eat, the materials our homes are built with, and everything else in between.

So, Trimble has a huge opportunity – and responsibility -- to provide technology solutions to each of these industries, and that’s where I get excited about what we’re doing with the Trimble Cloud platform, and for us, the Trimble Transportation Cloud. We’re able to leverage all that Trimble is doing in cloud computing to bring solutions to market that are going to transform the way all of these industries work.

What’s something that gets you excited about the transportation industry?

I really enjoy the meetings where we get up to the whiteboard and start discussing ways that we can make transportation better.

I’m excited about what we do for our customers and the opportunities we collectively have to make the world a better place. Within the transportation industry, there is a need and a collective desire to better leverage technology to make transportation safer for all of us, to improve the driver experience and to reduce empty miles.

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You can catch up with Ron in person at Trimble’s Insight Tech Conference + Expo, held Sept. 24-27, 2023, at The Venetian. Registration is open here – register by April 21, 2023, to take advantage of discounted Early Bird pricing.