Companies using or offering IoT-based products and services don’t want to be IoT network managers. Their focus is on digitally transforming their businesses, harnessing new capabilities and adopting new business models enabled by IoT. Time spent learning how to manage connectivity is a distraction that could also cause cost increases, delayed service introduction and lost competitive advantage.
It’s easy to understand why plug and play connectivity for devices is attractive for B2B companies in need of IoT connectivity solutions. If your core business is producing cars, leasing plant, monitoring patients or delivering parcels, you are increasingly dependent on IoT network connectivity. However, you’re a manufacturer and not a network operator so you don’t want to have to become an expert in all the available technologies on offer and you don’t want to have to form relationships with services providers in the 167 countries you operate in.
What you want is the ability for simple, cost-effective technology to be embedded into your devices, products or services at source as part of a construction or service initiation process. Then, once it is in its location of operation, it can switch-on and automatically configure itself to the most appropriate available network. You know your devices are connected and the provider of this enabling technology is doing its job properly. All the headaches of negotiating and managing capacity are done for you and for a transparent, fixed price and term.
This de-risking of connectivity is fundamental to the success of IoT.
Organisations targeting IoT services at scale should seek out specialist IoT connectivity providers that have the relationships to ensure the connectivity required is available. As customers, they’ll abstract away the complexity of connectivity management and, in addition, gain their providers’ economies of scale in terms of connectivity cost as well as their specifically-built software and supporting technologies.
Success in many areas will be all about speed – being first to market in many sectors can mean you own that market. A provider with a simple automated interface that you can interact with online, which offers a flat-rate prepaid fee for the connectivity each deployment requires and that can be bought and paid at once and for the device lifetime of 10 years , is not only simple, it will also be cost effective and, perhaps of even more importance when you’re trying to win a new market, it will be fast to enact.
Insights from 1NCE
