As demand for traditional landline services continues to falter, carriers like Verizon Communications Inc. are expanding into new markets with more promising growth prospects. The company stepped up its efforts today by entering an agreement to acquire vehicle management specialist Fleetmatics Group PLC for roughly $2.4 billion in cash.

The sum breaks down to $60 per share or 40 percent more than the Friday closing price of the firm’s stock, a hefty premium that reflects the importance of its technology to Verizon’s plans. Fleetmatics has developed a cloud-based vehicle management platform that helps organizations coordinate the activity of their truck drivers, technicians and other field personnel. It’s available in two editions: A small business version designed mainly for monitoring employees and a more feature-rich enterprise service called Reveal that also packs various automation capabilities.

Among them is an alerting tool that be configured to remind a company’s operations team whenever one of its trucks is due for a checkup. Fleetmatics enables users to schedule notifications based on mileage, engine run time or a fixed calendar depending on the requirements of their organization. The functionality is joined by a centralized dispatching console that the vendor says makes it possible to quickly find the fastest and most fuel-efficient route to a vehicle’s destination. For added measure, Reveal also creates a log of every trip after completion to help identify operational hiccups like unauthorized stops that are hampering field activities.

Verizon plans to integrate Fleetmatics’ technology into its budding telematics division. Seeing how the group focuses much of its efforts on smart cars with built-in sensors, the cloud service will likely be enhanced to take advantage of the telemetry data produced by such equipment. The carrier needs to provide a lot of value-added functionality if it wants to compete with Salesforce.com Inc., SAP SA and the other business automation giants that are targeting the vehicle management market. There are also numerous smaller contenders like the MapAnything Inc. that don’t have as much resources at disposal but are emerging as a force to be reckoned with nonetheless,

The acquisition of Fleetmatics is set to complete in the fourth quarter, shortly before Verizon’s recently confirmed purchase of Yahoo Inc.’s web business is expected to receive approval.

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