Software News
The Cutting Edge: 8 Trends Future-Minded Solution Providers Should Watch
Gina Narcisi
Solution providers with an eye toward the future know that edge computing is going to impact every corner of our lives, and they also know that the time is now to get in on the action. Here are eight key opportunities solution providers can leverage, from security to IoT as a service to distributed storage and more.
2. The Case For IoT as a Service
First comes IoT, then comes IoT as a service. The emerging trend is an important one that solution providers said will help increase IoT adoption. That’s because IoT as a service presents an attractive buying model for customers and a way for the channel to create a winning template for secure IoT use cases that can be scaled up or down easily.
Altaworx, a Fairhope, Ala.-based solution provider that was recently named to CRN’s 2022 IoT Innovators list, seized on the IoT opportunity early. Then, the company’s CEO, Rickie Richey, challenged his employees to look at IoT through an as-a-service lens.
Richey and his team have been busy in recent years developing an IoT platform. They started by creating an algorithm that allowed Altaworx to bill customers based on consumption of AT&T’s—and now, T-Mobile’s—LTE services if a customer failed over to cellular connectivity. The platform has since grown way beyond its initial scope, Richey said.
“I said to my company, ‘Look, I want you guys to go back and think about how somebody could build a managed service with this platform,’” he said.
Today, the Advanced Management Operations Platform (AMOP) is a tool that allows users—namely, other solution providers as well as enterprises—to fine-tune how their end customers manage and use data. The platform offers features such as packet filtering and private WAN services and lets users build customized business rate plans that can be throttled by the partner to decrease the risk of expensive overage fees. AMOP integrates with the Cisco Jasper platform for IoT cellular connectivity management.
The mature platform counts some of the country’s largest solution providers as users, Richey said.
One California-based solution provider that’s using AMOP handles LTE failover and Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) line replacements for service provider giant Lumen Technologies, the company’s largest customer. Still another AMOP customer, business LTE provider For2Fi, is using the platform to enable cellular as a primary internet connection for retail environments.
“We’re trying to get to where this becomes a platform that someone can use to manage all their customers and all their SIMs, whether they bought them from us or they bought them directly from AT&T. So now, they could either do a managed service with their SIMs or [our] SIMs, and it doesn’t really matter,” Richey said. “That’s what we’re really going to be pushing hard for in the next 12 months—building IoT as a managed service.”
