Welcome to 2020! I hope you enjoyed some rest and recuperation over the holiday period and have a prosperous, healthy and productive new year ahead. It’s been a busy start to the new year for the Thinxtra team as we’ve continued to expand our capabilities as “The IoT Telco”. It’s with great satisfaction we’re announcing a powerful new partnership which will revolutionise the role of IoT connectivity providers. Thinxtra is joining forces with Soracom to create an exciting new cellular IoT connectivity offering for Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong to complement the Sigfox 0G network, allowing us to always offer truly fit for purpose IoT connectivity.
Soracom began as an IoT focused start-up, formed by a group of enterprising cloud and telco engineers. Their focus was to democratise IoT connectivity to enable businesses to productise IoT solutions faster, cheaper and more securely. Today Soracom’s connectivity management platform lets customers connect and control IoT networks, whether one SIM or millions. The user-friendly console allows businesses to remotely manage devices, build dashboards and create private IoT networks on the go; all covered by a ‘fit-for-IoT’ pricing model that allows users to pay on a consumption basis.
The new Thinxtra cellular IoT offering delivers a global pay-per use consumption model, self-serve routing options, enhanced security and minimised data management. Our partnership with Soracom delivers connectivity management that overcomes some of the most problematic challenges to successful IoT deployments, including cost blowouts, long lead times and the inability to easily scale. As a specialised IoT Telco focused on enabling and supporting successful IoT projects, we’re excited to extend our Sigfox 0G network with Soracom.
By working at the coal face of IoT development over the last five years, the Thinxtra team knows what it takes to deliver successful IoT projects. As importantly, we understand what our customers need to give their IoT deployment the best chance of success.
A key ingredient for IoT success is the ability to scale with a predictable cost profile, without a corresponding increase in operational complexity. The ability to seamlessly dial-up and consume more enabling services as a deployment grows is critical to frictionless growth. Our friends in the cloud world have made a huge contribution to IoT growth by ensuring this is possible for the software and compute side of a solution; but what about connectivity?
A decade ago, companies like Jasper led the way to improved connectivity with SIM management platforms. These platforms were great at solving some of the commercial challenges of scaling cellular connectivity while maintaining cost control. However, SIM management platforms really only helped local deployments. The concept of global expansion still causes CFOs sleepless nights as they mull over the lesser of two evils: expensive global roaming rates, or local procurement in every country you want to target.
Technically, managing APN infrastructure has been known to cause similar grief, with long lead times, cost blowouts and lack of flexibility often stalling successful and high growth IoT projects.
This new offering delivers many benefits for our customers and partners. First, the innovative commercial model offers customers a true ‘pay-per-use’ consumption model for cellular connectivity in over a hundred countries. One contract deployed globally, with access by the day, and usage by the megabyte, ensures customers can focus on making their business successful with the peace of mind that comes from predictable costs and limitless potential. This is a game changer for companies and developers with global ambitions.
Second, the cellular offering extends a full feature set of self-serve routing options. This allows customers to connect SIMs securely to their application, whether it’s located in a private data centre, a public cloud, or both. All configured directly by the customer within the platform in a matter of minutes.
This new offering includes many more features designed to enhance security and minimise the data management required for IoT applications. Our partnership ensures that connectivity management can now be an enabler, not a hindrance, to scale IoT projects demanding cellular activity.
We’ll be sharing more information about our new offering later this month. Contact our Sales team if you have any questions or would like to register to receive more information.