Interview hosted by Saverio Romeo – Principal Analyst at Beecham Research – a leading analyst firm in M2M/IoT with global coverage.
In order to more closely address such market trends, the M2M industry is moving from a purely vertical approach, typical of the traditional M2M view, to a horizontal approach, typical of the Internet of Things vision that crosses multiple sectors
In this transition, Service Enablement Service (SES) platforms are fundamental because they enable the necessary flexibility by providing a middleware layer on which to develop applications in the easiest possible way. Such platforms are also vital because they enable management of the increasing number of devices and the volume of data they produce.
The SES platform market landscape is rich with solutions, and one of its compelling market players is the provider Cycle30 from Seattle in the US. With its roots in the telecoms carrier world, Cycle30 first introduced a billing solution for Communication Service Providers (CSPs) in 2010. The vendor soon realised there wasmuch more their technology could offer. As the opportunity to add value in the IoT market became clear, Cycle30 explored the space and, in response to market demand, decided to spin out a separate product called Mobius designed specifically for IoT and M2M. In March of this year, Mobius was introduced, delivering telecoms-grade billing and innovative device provisioning to the M2M market. Cycle30’s chief executive, Jim Dunlap, recently discussed the company’s strategy and approach with Beecham Research.
Saverio Romeo: Can you tell us how Cycle30 has developed to address this market?
Jim Dunlap: The heritage of Cycle30 is strongly rooted in the telecoms industry. In fact, our parent company is a publicly owned, US based telecoms and cable company. This enables us to have a unique understanding of how platforms for telecoms players should be designed in order to serve the customer in the most effective way.
The billing solution market is largely populated by software companies developing billing products for telecoms operators but the operators then have to integrate the software solution with their infrastructure. That step is not easy, partly because that infrastructure continues to develop into new technological generations and partly because the operator sector is experiencing a wave of consolidation which sees mergers of companies with different back office approaches. Cycle30 designed and developed Pivot, our billing solution, with an operator in mind and with the frame of mind of an operator.
The key challenge we tackled with our solution was enabling an intelligent amalgamation of the large amount of billing data that decision makers have to use and analyse in order to take actions. The approach has not been about providing as much info as possible on the screen, but providing the right data at the necessary level of detail for the specific decision that has to be made. The platform understands who is accessing data and for what reasons.
We then use rule-based access that narrows down the type and volume of data necessary for taking each decision. All of this is achieved inside a graphically rich user interface that facilitates workflow management and the decision making process. Pivot is ideal for mid-tier telecoms operators, from quad play to simple voice and data operators with less than two million subscribers. Part of that success is attributable to our expertise in facilitating commercial services, a key area of growth for our customer base. Our ability to scale and deploy services quickly is also recognised: one of our customers is running nearly $1bn a year though Pivot, with a mix of residential, mobile and broadband services, as well as commercial and satellite. We can do this because we understand the space and we’ve designed our cloud-based service from the ground up to scale transparently, always keeping ahead of our customers’ growth needs.
Saverio Romeo: Can you tell us about your move towards the IoT world?
Jim Dunlap: Our journey into the IoT world was prompted by a collaboration with Arrow Electronics. They strongly valued our billing solution, so they proposed that we develop a platform to address the machine-to-machine world. At the time, we were focused on telecoms OSS/BSS, but our close collaboration with Arrow Electronics was a richly rewarding knowledge sharing experience.
We explored the M2M market, its challenges, and the landscape of solutions available at the time in the market. We identified the key gaps, one of which was complex billing. At the beginning we thought we could adapt Pivot for the M2M space. However, we soon realised that a telecoms billing system – used to metering services by data megabytes or voice minutes – just didn’t have the feature set that the market was demanding: there were other areas to cover such as device management, diagnostics and inventory updates.
It’s important to note that this wasn’t just our system, but all the BSS platforms that were trying to force a square peg solution into a round hole problem. No one was meeting the need, so the work evolved very rapidly towards a new platform, Mobius, that could deliver what the market was calling for. That comprises: a complete, end-to-end solution that addresses the entire lifecycle of devices in the Internet of Things.
Saverio Romeo: The current market landscape of Service Enablement Service platforms is populated by several solutions and many of them claim to offer an end-to-end approach. How do you differentiate Mobius from these other platforms?
Jim Dunlap: I agree that there are several platforms in the marketplace and that many of them claim to offer full device management solutions. However, looking at these solutions in more detail, we see two main problems. The first problem regards the user interface. They are not friendly and effective enough to manage and take decisions over a large number of devices.
The second problem lies around the interpretation of what a device management platform should do. It should look at the entire lifecycle of the device, from on-boarding the device to how to monetise the device. You need a billing methodology flexible enough to adapt to different billing models and financial contexts such as changes in taxation.
In contrast, Mobius looks at the entire lifecycle of the device knowing that within the lifetime of that device, dramatic changes can occur. The other platforms were not developed with this view. Therefore, they are not flexible enough to face uncertainty and change. Mobius has been designed to include all the steps of the life of a device. It is a cloud-based solution and globally available. It’s flexible enough to adapt to different OEM industry verticals from asset management to automotive to animal monitoring, or for CSPs looking for a fast entry into IoT services, or even for other IoT-enabling platforms looking for a better back-office solution, in which case we white-label the user interface so it looks like the rest of their system.
Saverio Romeo: In your work, the role of diagnostics and data analytics seem to have a prominent role. Can you tell us about your approach to data analytics?
Jim Dunlap: Our platform gathers different sets of data – usage, diagnostics and device lifecycle data – and makes all this data available in realtime through our analytics engine. We care about the device performance, not the data the device is collecting, which is handed off to a separate application. We have a set of performance analytics but, we also know that customers want to run their own analysis and use it for their specific application development process.
Therefore, our data analytics engine can easily be integrated with the customers’ needs. That said, we are working towards the development of an application layer for specific sectors. For example, we believe our extensive experience with customers on the North Slope of Alaska would let us develop a better solution than what is currently available for the oil and gas industry.
In terms of the capability of our analytics engine, at the moment, it is able to run real-time analytics around the status of the device. However, we believe that being able to run predictive analytics over specific business questions is very important. In order to do that, we could develop this capability in house or partner with specialised data analytics providers.
Saverio Romeo: Oil and gas seems to be a sector that has your close attention, but which other sectors do you see strong opportunities in?
Jim Dunlap: It’s important to note that Mobius is a very flexible system that works across the horizontal landscape, but if we had to identify sweet spots, then automotive is a very appealing vertical. The utility sector is also interesting with several applications in smart metering, smart grid, energy management systems and solutions in the areas of water resources. There are many other areas to focus on, but the ones we want to address strongly are the ones that are more industrial in nature.
Automotive, utility and oil and gas are part of that category. From this perspective, the healthcare sector is also very attractive. We see hospitals moving from purchasing expensive surgical equipment to renting equipment on a usage based model. Healthcare providers of those solutions will then need M2M solutions, as will fleet management and heavy equipment tracking. Finally, because of our carrier heritage, our expertise with broadband and the fact that our system is connectivity-agnostic, we see a natural fit with smart home and home automation solutions. We have pilots in all the sectors I mentioned, and I’m sure we’ll continue to see deployments in other areas we haven’t even thought of yet.
Saverio Romeo: Looking at the smart home space and, more generally, indoor environments, how do you see the coexistence of different connectivity solutions and how your platform supports multiple types of connectivity?
Jim Dunlap: As I said, Mobius is agnostic for any type of connectivity and any type of device. This point matters because the industry needs to be prepared for multi-device and multi-connectivity types of scenario. Cellular communications do not, and will not, hold exclusivity in the M2M and the IoT world. We are increasingly seeing the use of a variety of fixed wireless and wired communications technologies. We expect that cable providers will use their high-speed broadband infrastructures for M2M purposes. We also expect that they will roll out their own Wi-Fi network in order to integrate with their fixed one and expand their M2M offer. From the beginning, we knew we needed to be prepared for the unknown, and it’s already here.
Saverio Romeo: Can you discuss the current pilots and deployments of Mobius?
Jim Dunlap: We completed the platform at the end of 2013 and we launched Mobius in March 2014. Since then, we have had a very busy period with many pilots. I say pilots, but these are running on our production system, so they are very real. We expect to see them switch to commercial deployments in the next couple of months. At this moment, a precision livestock farming solution is using our platform. The solution monitors the livestock in the fields, but it also measures the health conditions of the livestock in order to increase productivity. Solutions based on smart watch and smart shoes are also running on Mobius. We also have projects in fleet management, usage-based insurance, asset tracking and utility monitoring.
Saverio Romeo: From a Mobius user perspective, what does the deployment experience resemble?
Jim Dunlap: Making the deployment process easy was a strong criterion in the design and development of Mobius. Mobius can go live in days without impacting the operations of the users. There are cases in which the deployment process has completed and Mobius is in operation after just a few hours.
Saverio Romeo: Please can you discuss your goto- market strategy?
Jim Dunlap: We believe that partnerships in the M2M industry are fundamental. Our partnership with Arrow Electronics has widened our presence in the market. Our partnership with Device Cloud Networks (DCN) is also significant. DCN provides connectivity, while we offer the device management and monetisation platform. In the case of Mobius, we see three go-to-market models. The first one is going directly to the service providers, the telecoms providers and the utility providers. The second one revolves around direct sales or through resellers into the OEM, such as an automotive maker. The third approach looks at the so-called platform enablers. These are M2M players with a large customer base dealing with multiple connectivity options that want to have an end-to-end platform. We address those directly or through resellers. On the Pivot side, our direct sales team goes directly to the carriers.
We thank Jim Dunlap for taking us into the life of Cycle30 and its approach to the IoT market. Building on extensive telecoms experience and key partnerships, Cycle30 is offering an easy-touse end-to-end Mobius device management platform that addresses the entire life of an M2M device. Currently, several applications in different sectors run on Mobius and many others will adopt it. The solution is also evolving as Cycle30 introduces advanced analytics and application development solutions for specific sectors.
