The RTTV industry stands at a critical inflection point:
If the current Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders can't solve these fundamental challenges, perhaps it's time for the industry to look beyond the established players toward truly innovative solutions.
Let’s break it down:
Are We Finally Calling Out the Industry's Shortcomings?
The Real-Time Transportation Visibility (RTTV) space has been in the spotlight recently, with excellent discussions surrounding whether vendors are delivering on their promises, how data quality is impacting outcomes, and what the future of freight-tech will look like. A few insightful comments can be found by reading: Gartner’s latest recently released magic quadrant, FourKite’s press release about leaving the Magic Quadrant, Anthony Miller’s always entertaining LinkedIn post and Jonah McIntire’s view of the market (hilariously bias, but interesting).
In short, the Real-Time Transportation Visibility (RTTV) space has reached a critical juncture. While vendors have spent years promising revolutionary improvements in supply chain management, serious questions are emerging about whether they're delivering on these promises.
The biggest industry shake-up? FourKites has elected to leave the Gartner Magic Quadrant, presumably after being passed over by Project44 — again. This decision raises profound questions not just about Gartner's credibility, but about the entire RTTV industry's trajectory with one of the most prominent players ostensibly saying they are no longer in the RTTV business.
The Broken Promise of RTTV: What's Working & What's Not?
After years of hype about RTTV benefits—cost savings, efficiency, better decision-making—the actual results tell a different story:
|
Promised Benefit |
Delivery Status |
Assessment |
|
Customer Service ("Where is my shipment?") |
✅ Delivered |
80%+ effectiveness |
|
Lower Freight Costs |
⚠️ Partial |
Some success, mostly in ocean freight detention/demurrage avoidance |
|
Faster, Better Decision-Making |
❌ Failed |
Visibility does not equate to actionability |
|
Network Optimization |
❌ Failed |
Not happening at all |
|
Reduced Freight Losses |
❌ Failed |
General freight losses have remained unchanged for the past decade, but cold chain and valuable goods space losses have increased year-over-year.
|
The primary culprit behind these shortcomings? Data quality — or rather, the troubling absence of it and a lack of focus on high-value, critical or sensitive cargo (the freight one really needs to track).
The Data Problem: A Decade Later, Still Unresolved
It's a glaring red flag that after a decade, data quality remains a critical issue for the biggest names in RTTV.
Gartner itself has noted that both FourKites and Project44 continue to struggle with data reliability. This isn't just one challenge among many — it's the foundation upon which everything else depends. If this foundation is broken, all the AI, predictive insights, and automation layered on top amount to little more than lipstick on a pig.
FourKites withdrawing from Gartner’s Magic Quadrant speaks volumes. While they claim to have "moved beyond RTTV," a more plausible explanation is their desire to avoid another public defeat after repeatedly being outranked by Project44. However, if they have modified their focus, what do they profess to do and what does that mean for the market?
This situation forces us to question Gartner's role:
Industry insiders recognize that Gartner's Magic Quadrant functions as much as a marketing vehicle as an objective assessment. In any event, we all know that the most capable solutions don't always earn the highest rankings.
The Future of Freight-Tech: Visibility is necessary, but in its current form, insufficient
For too long, RTTV vendors have focused on showing data rather than enabling action. The premise that "if you can see it, you can act on it" has proven inadequate. The simple fact is visibility without action delivers minimal value.
For the industry to meaningfully evolve, it must embrace these principles:
None of the companies in Gartner's current RTTV Magic Quadrant fully satisfy these requirements.
Product Roadmaps: Strategic Evolution or Desperate Market-Hunting?
The major players' product roadmaps and M&A strategies reveal their trajectories and limitations:
Project44: Embarked on an acquisition spree, purchasing smaller players to address platform gaps. This approach has delivered breadth but not depth — they remain fundamentally a data aggregator rather than a transformative solution. As Gartner noted, they also struggle with data quality.
FourKites: Has struggled to expand beyond its core offering. Their inability to resolve data quality issues likely contributed to their Gartner exit. No amount of "AI" marketing or "dock scheduling" capabilities can compensate for underlying data quality and customer satisfaction challenges. Both Project44 and FourKites would be wise to find a solution to their underlying data quality issues
Shippeo: While their data quality is better (kudos to them for getting the fundamentals right), they remain fixated on "visibility" as a standalone offering. Early on in their growth, they did dip their toe into tangential solutions by acquiring a dock scheduling solution. However, they jettisoned that offering almost as quickly as they acquired it. Finally, their approach to automation — sending notification emails about alerts — falls far short of true automation or value creation.
Overhaul: Has established a niche in security, distinguishing them from competitors but not positioning them as a comprehensive RTTV alternative. Gartner is right to consider them a potential challenger, but Overhaul will likely remain a challenger or even fall back into the ‘niche’ category as Gartner and others realize they function more as a service provider than a technology platform (e.g. a Flexport want-to-be).
The bottom line: Neither R&D nor M&A have addressed the fundamental issues of poor data quality, lack of actionability, and failure to deliver genuine business value.
The Ideal RTTV Solution: Beyond Dashboards and Charts
Customers don't need another dashboard or more visualizations. They need solutions that fulfill the original promise of RTTV.
An ideal solution would:
About the Author
Brian Shultz is the Chief Growth Officer at Paxafe and a 30-year freight-tech industry veteran having worked with such companies as Navis, IAS (later Blume Global), ABB and most recently lead Shippeo’s commercial entrance into the Americas.