Vinli recently hired an executive vice president of partnerships who has an extensive background both with automakers and a pair of well-known technology companies.

Taking on this role for the connected car and data intelligence platform provider is George Ayres, who most recently served as a client partner for automotive at IBM.

Previously, Ayres was the vice president of global sales for Verizon Telematics and has also held leadership roles at both Ford and Jaguar during his career spanning three decades in the automotive industry.

“George has rare experience and unique skillsets in the automotive industry and is the perfect candidate to expand the Vinli ecosystem,” Vinli founder and chief executive officer Mark Haidar said in a news release.

Vinli’s cloud-based and containerized open micro-services platform can allow its clients and partners to quickly respond to the rapidly changing mobility market. For example, understanding how customers drive and maintain a vehicle, and predicting maintenance and crashes, may influence a fleet company’s insurance rates. The fleet company can also use this same data to incentivize drivers to improve their driving behavior and attention to vehicle maintenance.

“The automotive industry is constantly changing and there’s a lot of expansion within the connected and autonomous vehicle space right now,” Ayres said. “My motivation has always been to stay on the leading edge of this high-tech digital transformation, and that’s why I’m joining Vinli. Their fast-moving and agile team is making really interesting things happen through innovative connected vehicle technology, data and predictive analytics.”

And Vinli sees the future as encompassing much more.

“Beyond automotive, industries from retail to insurance are using mobile technology, geo-location targeting, and micro-personalized data to be even more relevant to their customers,” Ayres said.

“What these companies want to figure out is how to leverage transportation and vehicle data so they can engage with their customers better and integrate it with the other information they already have. Vinli is uniquely organized to lead in this space," he went on to say.