AGX/DE Both aim to collect and connect data. Advantage AJXDeere & Co. (DE) Q3 2021 Results - Earnings Call Transcript
Aug. 20, 2021
Kristen E. Owen - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division - Associate
"And Jahmy, I know you said it's too early to commit to a single autonomy business model, but maybe give us a broader sense of the foundation of recurring revenue that you have today and how we should think about that evolving across the portfolio."
Jahmy J. Hindman - Deere & Company - CTO
"Yes. So that fundamentally is about just trying to reduce the friction for customers to collect their data and get their data in a usable format, right?
That's about us trying to minimize the amount of inertia that they have to overcome in order to collect that data. It removes 1 more hurdle for a customer to take that data and put it in a useful place and to start extracting insights from it."
AgJunction Inc. (AJXGF) CEO Dr. M. Brett McMickell on Q2 2021 Results - Earnings Call Transcript
Aug. 13, 2021
"In the second quarter, we are pleased to announce our collaboration with Bosch by joining the NEVONEX partner network."
"Through this partnership, we will be integrating NEVONEX into our hardware modules with the goal of providing our customers with the flexibility to operate, connect and manage their farms more efficiently. This collaboration will allow us to work towards helping our customers deploy and connect to a range of automated processes from leading seed and crop companies. NEVONEX increases the addressable market of our automation modules and highlights the flexibility of our automated solution.
In the future, we believe this partnership as well as others we are working on will aid in connecting our products to a broad range of third-party systems, thus, empowering farmers with easy-to-use and connected technology."
Q&A Session:
Question
"Moving on to this NEVONEX, that Bosch network. To me, it sounds like some kind of a software-defined functionality that would support kind of the automation, autonomy, et cetera. And I see some -- their software is being put into AgJunction equipment and AgJunction software being put into this network. Could you help me out a little and explain what is what, and kind of how -- help me visualize how it works?
Yes. This is a great partnership, and we're really pleased to be part of the NEVONEX partner network. As you described, the NEVONEX software and that connectivity is being integrated into AgJunction automation modules. And so it will allow customers in the future to connect their data with other systems as well as run third-party software. So this change in ability to run third-party software increases the flexibility of our hardware.
And so that's one of the major advantages of what we're doing going forward is even improving on this flexibility by supporting third-party software. So you'll be able to see other third-party functions that are developed or even currently being developed, being deployed on our hardware. And then as you mentioned, it is also a distribution channel for some of the software modules. As we are going through this modularization, it's not only modularization of our hardware that we've been working on, but also modularizing our software. And so that we can offer the software up and their software licenses.
And so this is a really great partnership that will allow us to get access to a larger addressable market for our software modules in particular, but also offer increased functionality for our customers once we get this developed and deployed."
Question
"All right. So if an OEM buys -- or incorporate -- buys and incorporates a module from AgJunction that is loaded with the NEVONEX software, then that allows that OEM and that OEM's customers to access the resources of NEVONEX, everybody -- all the other partners on NEVONEX or selected partners or just you?
Dr. M. Brett McMickell
No. It's open to third parties. So it won't be just -- it won't be just running our software modules, and it won't be connected just to our network. I mean that's one of the -- goals of the strategy with NEVONEX as well as some other partners that we're working on is to really provide our customers the flexibility to connect up to this very fragmented system right now with IoT devices and farm management systems. And so we're uniquely placed in the vehicle, and we're creating that connected platform to allow for that data sharing as well as the operation of third-party software.
So it's not just ours. And yes, it will be offered as a functionality -- additional functionality for OEMs. And we're also looking at deploying this later on into the direct channel. Right now, our focus is really around our indirect channel, both for our VARs and for OEMs to provide this additional functionality. But in the future, this is absolutely something that the -- that will benefit the direct channel as the farmers are facing this increasingly difficult choice of how to connect all of these farm automation and farm management systems.
And so we're going to -- we're trying to help the farmer fix that by really handling that complexity ourselves and through our cloud back end."