What to Expect When You're Connecting
What to Expect When You're Connecting includes interviews with a wide range of industry subject matter experts who share their journey, advice, and the mistakes they've made along the way in IoT. If you're adding connectivity to your products for the first time or seeking to optimize and scale your existing connectivity operations – welcome to the conversation.
What to Expect When You're Connecting
Juggling Multiple Cellular Data Carriers (with Allen Boone)
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In today's episode, we're joined by Alan Boone, CEO and founder of Simetric to delve into the intricacies of managing multiple carriers and how technology is revolutionizing cost savings. We'll explore how innovations are streamlining operations, detecting anomalies, supporting IT asset monitoring, and automating workflows. Plus, we'll discuss the challenges and potential wastage associated with large enterprise deployments that typically engage with an average of eight different cellular carriers.
Welcome to what to expect when you're connecting a podcast for IOT professionals and the IOT curious. Who find themselves responsible for growing executing or educating others about the challenges with connecting products and services to the internet. you'll learn from industry experts who understand those challenges deeply. And what they've done to overcome them now for your host, Ryan Carlson.
RyanToday, we're here with Alan Boone on what to expect when you're connecting, and we're talking about the secrets of juggling multiple carriers and uncovering cost savings that come from places unknown. They're not unknown, Alan, are they? It's when you're doing connectivity, there's always surprises.
AllenEvery month, it tends to be surprises with what on your bill and a lot of complexity in managing those carrier engagements. And yeah we certainly find that there's a lot of unexpected costs that happen as you go through a year.
RyanAlan Boone, you're the chief executive officer and founder of Simetric.
AllenThat is correct. It's very nice to be here. Ryan, thank you for having me on.
RyanMy pleasure. And the whole purpose of this series is you're going to help us write the chapter of people who are somewhere along their connected journey and the conversation we're having is less about someone who's brand new to connectivity, but it's someone who has an existing product is launching their second, third or subsequent product and You've already got a set of operational debt that you've already invested in. You've got people, you've got processes, you've got a carrier. If you're using cellular for your connectivity Alan, walk me through what happens next when you decide you want to switch carriers or you acquire a product line and it comes with its own carriers, what typically happens at a company. That people don't often think about
AllenIt's actually interesting. The walk that we find that most customers have is by the time they get to a point of complexity where they really need help, they have not only engaged with one cellular carrier, they might have engaged with four or five or six and every one of those new carriers they start working with adds a different layer of complexity. There's layers of complexity reside in the systems and tools that are available for management, but also just the business rules and business logic that each carrier has that can be slightly nuanced. And you're always having to learn how to deal with each carrier in a little bit of separate fashion and that just adds more and more fragmentation into the experience of managing a unified device.
RyanSo let's talk a little bit about what that looks like. So people at home are the symptoms that you're feeling itching, sneezing, wheezing it's around. I've heard things around SIM lifecycle management, changing plans is different between carriers. Sometimes you can do it yourself. Sometimes you need to get on a phone and a customer's support rep needs to make those changes for you. Sometimes you can do it one by one. Sometimes you can do it by a group. In every case, there's friction. Operationally, what are some of those symptoms compounding operational debt?
AllenYeah, let's just take a look at 2 of the bigger carriers and talk about how they operate. So if you are with an AT& T, for example, you can make a rate plan change at any point in time that whatever your device is on at the end of the. Billing cycle, that's what you're going to get billed for. That's the data you're going to buy. So it's a pure utility based pricing model that gives you the ability to make changes right up until the bill cycle ends and, ensure that you're getting the right cost structure, that's just a rate plan change, the other carrier in in the U the larger carrier in terms of in this space is Verizon. Now Verizon will let you change rate plans, but they only allow you to do it a certain number of times per month. And you can only increase your rate plan. So if you've got a one megabyte plan, you can only go to, a higher level rate plan if you want to change it. And they do allow for backdating. So in effect, they're creating a utility based model as well. It's just different and how it operates. That gets compounded and I will stretch out of the U. S. and go up into Canada where some carriers even outside of rate plans, they'll allow you to move your devices into an activation ready status. Before the end of the cycle, and if it never uses data in that next cycle, you're never being charged for it, right? It'll automatically move back to an active status when it starts passing data. And these are just some of the, of a ton of nuances that go into the business logic that carriers deploy when they're in this IT space.
RyanSo what is the impact of switching carriers? So if there are these differences, what does the business feel? And what does that translate into financially, operationally, tactically?
AllenYeah. Let's switching carriers just is really hard. It's, and it's not just the expense of it. Okay. So the expense of actually changing out sums or being able to go out and physically touch a device to change the APN, those things are incredibly expensive to do. So what we find is more people looking at how do I migrate. Over time to a carrier of choice. And, we don't see people saying I'm ever going to go away from multiple carriers. What we see is, I've got a set of use cases that are better served by one carrier or another. And maybe as I'm going to 5G or I'm expanding internationally a certain carrier, a certain type of carrier makes more sense. And so really it's this notion of a managed migration. But if you don't know where your install base is, you don't know how to migrate, right? And one of the bigger things that we find is that, this world has been built up with spreadsheets and people. And to have pure visibility of where your devices are actually at in their life cycle requires an immense amount of data, data analysis by a person with a spreadsheet. Okay. And so even to be able to talk about how do I start migrating my devices, there's still, there's already just this lack of visibility on where the devices are located, what carrier they might be with and which direction might make the best sense based on particular use cases.
RyanOne of the things I find interesting about consumers and even in businesses is that it doesn't always matter if there's a product that's better, if I wanted to switch Internet providers or cable TV or any of these things It can't just be a little bit better. There has to be typically a big benefit because change is disruptive, and we as humans hate it. But when you're talking about a business that might have hundreds or tens of thousands of devices out in the field, knowing that at some point. If the cost savings are big enough or the technical advantages are big enough, you're going to need to touch that device at some point, but you can't do it all at the same time. And as you mentioned, there's just going to be situations where putting hands on a device, especially in a commercial setting, costs far more than you might save in three years of pennies saved on, on cellular. So it's not a, it's not always just about the pennies. It's all of those other expenses, truck rolls are expensive, labor time is expensive. finding a way to take the sting out of switching, and put together a migration path that makes the most sense and, address those operational bottlenecks, Walk me through what this uncovers by applying a technology layer to automate what is traditionally a very manual cumbersome process. And are there any hidden gold nuggets that you get out of adding that layer of automation on top?
Allenthe first thing you get is visibility, just plain and simple, where everything is located and you get this wealth of information that really hasn't been used and to the degree it's a value that it actually prints because it is so hard and so cumbersome today. But what you have is you have people that are very excited about what you can do with 5G, what's going on with edge computing, and and then hard, also businesses that, that are very, economically aware of their situation. How do I start to migrate maybe to a new carrier that is going to have better support mechanisms and the support mechanisms, not just for that particular carrier, but for all carriers and managing connectivity and totality and you can't get to a level of just. A single pane of glass uh, for multi carrier management manual, it's just not feasible. The technologies, we've put in place, allow people to to get to that level. Now, the cool thing that starts to happen as you see customers go down this journey and the journey is about. Visibility. The journey then moves into this world of levels of device connectivity management and consistency in the way that is done, regardless of carrier and then gets broader into levels of anomaly detection, where, you can start to see things that are problematic in your deployment that you've never been able to see before, during the build cycle and not get surprised at the end of the cycle. Yeah, that even leads itself into levels really deep levels of process automation and process automation that can be as simple as, turning off devices if they hit certain thresholds or as complex as integrations into provisioning systems and ordering systems so that you can activate and deactivate and keep your revenue aligned with your cost structure. And then you're going to take that one step further and you get to this world of real asset management. And now you're starting to talk about workflow and the ability to have a plan about how to migrate devices over time. And that might or might not include a different set of carriers. But it gives you a model in which you can you can take and start looking and planning out how to migrate, when to migrate. To the better experience for your end customer. And that's what we're really about is that, and that's what we really see is that flow from being able to use data that's never been used before, all the way to being able to manage assets in different ways
Ryanthis reminds me of the Home and commercial utility world where you had connected devices, they put the little clamp that goes onto a power cable and can monitor the output of a piece of equipment, right? The first goal is just say, are we wasting power? Are we leaving things on when we don't need to be using it? Is a particular device drawing more current than it needs to, right? So you've seen all of these devices, but the data Yeah. Is cheap. You don't need more hardware, just like with what you're doing a Simetric. Once you're tied into the carriers of pulling data, adding layers of automation that utilizes the data that's already there. I don't want to call it. It's free, but you get to have that exponential value, like with the power monitoring, they can add layers of automation that say, you know what we see, you've got six pumps all running at the same time, about the same power output every day. And one of them just dropped off a bunch. That's anomalous. There might be something wrong with pump number three out of six. And so I'm hearing what you're saying is if you're monitoring all of these different cellular plans that a company might be managing across carriers. You can make some of the same extrapolations around usage, waste, and identify potentially cost savings. Talk to me about this notion of using analytics to create cost savings on a commodity that most people already want to try and save as much money on because it's a cost.
AllenOkay. So let's talk about a couple of different instances. And the first one I'll hit is the anomalous behavior that you find in every deployment. Through monitoring, we can see when devices start going in and out of times, they're not transmitting any data or very small bits, which means that you have a. You have a customer problem or you have a security issue with someone trying to get into a device. So that's going to start to affect your ability to better manage your customers. And this is a revenue impact, right? You can see devices that get a firmware update that start transmitting massive amounts of data, right? You can catch those things and correct them before they generate so much data that you've got a, you've got a material billing problem,
RyanYou're right. I'm going to pause right there. Like I've been. At a company where the R& D team had the cellular device on the test bench and it started kicking out anomalous data and racked up a 7, 000 data bill because it just was just spitting out error codes, but it was transmitting and the reason why it never was caught. Is because you don't know how much data you've used with most of the carriers. You do not know how much data you've used until you get your bill at the end of the month.
AllenThat's right. That's right. And that's why monitoring in cycle is so important in this space. You have to be able to see what's going on. I've got numerous examples, but one of our first customers, the reason they came to us is they had a someone take a SIM chip out of an IOT device and stick it into an iPad. And then that person went to Mexico. And so there was streaming video on the iPad. So not only were they getting a massive data over, they also picked up roaming on top.
RyanFor sure.
Allenlike today, all of that data is available to, to better manage it. It's just hidden. It's under the covers. And so you have to pull it up.
RyanYeah. And I know that not every carrier offers things like at Soracom, we've got an IMEI lock, which allows you to, when the SIM is activated, it can automatically say, I will only work for the radio that I provisioned in. And you could swap that SIM and put it in another device and it won't. Send data, but most carriers they don't care. In fact, they want you to use as much data as possible. There's no incentive at all to stop the use of anomalous data to use less data. Like they make money when you use data. do you have any other examples of anyone where they really uncovered a whole pile of waste?
Allenyes, because the revenue systems tend to be disconnected from the cost systems in most of the companies that we work with, one of the first things we do is deploy a usage based view of historical data that says across all of my carriers. Give me every device that hasn't used data in the last 12 months. Okay, we find 8, 10, 12% of devices being paid for that are not being utilized. And most of the time that turns into the fact that again, you get you mentioned this operational debt, it's an operational debt for companies that started in a way where they're really hyper focused on revenue. And yes, connectivity is a component of the cost structure, but it's one that we can manage with people what's gotten too complex and too heavy to manage just with people and spreadsheets. And so you're finding this disconnect between. I'm charging my customer for, or I'm deploying some of my enterprise to do a specific function. And I pull that device back in, but the SIM never gets deactivated. So it's one of our bigger things that we find on almost every customer.
RyanAnd that's lining up automation with what an internal process might be. Is this
AllenThat
Ryantriggering off of like RMAs or,
Allenyou, we can.
Ryanlike all sorts of things.
AllenWe actually do that in what I would call like our, about our second stage of deployment, which is when you're really doing some broader analytics around just what from the carrier data. Now, what that translates into is, oh, yes, I definitely now want to connect my revenue system or my other inventory system. So I know that when I take a device back and shut it down, it automatically deactivates the sum. So that's that business automation that starts to come into play where the real value is, right? Because at the end of the day, if you've got systems already in place that are tracking one part of the equation, it's just plugging them into the cost component of the equation related to the cellular cell chips.
Ryanso how much money does this, eight to 12% translate into?
AllenWe had we had one customer fairly large customer and for them, it was about four and a half million dollars a year.
RyanIs that all?
AllenYeah, just that. the other thing that we do, and it's not something that has a material, but it has material cost savings is, and you mentioned it before carriers love breakage. It's just, it's, if you go over your particular rate plan the amount of data that you purchased, then you're going to get an overage charge. We find that, we can say folks, additional. Got some someplace. Some customers we've saved over 20% just in making sure that they're buying the data that they use. And you want to talk about a very complex math problem. 30, 000 devices. And 6 ring plans equals 62. 5 billion combinations to get to the lowest cost structure. Like again, humans can't do that.
RyanNo, they can't. What does this intake process look like? What does it look like for a team to go through the motions? That are, that takes some of the scariness out of switching.
AllenThe, what takes the scariness out of switching is just managing it more actively. And that, comes with a tool like Simetric. And being able to see and get your arms around everything that's happening during the month in any given bill cycle, then you're, then you change the question about which carrier is best for the use case of my particular device or my, or the new device or new thing that I'm bringing on. Uh, and, And so you can have a different discussion versus it being uh, just about switching carriers to how do I better manage my business? Like, where are my better business outcomes? we start looking at things like viewing usage and doing analytics around the devices themselves, the device types. And then you can see the ones that maybe are not transmitting data as efficiently. And so you want to take those out first because they do generate a substantial cost savings. But, it's really what we also see is we don't see people taking those cost savings and taking them to the bottom line. They just accelerate migrations right into the new thing that they're doing, because what they're doing is they're freeing up budget. In order to really accelerate where they want to go.
RyanSo what would that look like reinvesting the savings in connectivity? If you're finding money one place what's the smart play for reinvesting that?
AllenSo every customer that we work with is on a tremendous growth path. This industry is exploding. With edge compute with 5g, it's just, it's it's amazing to see really, but so what it looks like for us is you might have a product that you're set to roll out and you might be rolling it out in an additional geography. All of a sudden that becomes 234 geographies to to really accelerate the movement to where you're going in the future. So it's identifying waste in your current ecosystem and then being able to apply that to a planned migration over time. And that plan migration can be accelerated. If you're getting rid of more waste in your existing environment, and let's face it, everyone that is in this world, we have real economic concerns or real economic guideposts. And we're always set up to manage within those guideposts. This just lets you change the way in which you can.
RyanSo there's a number of different challenges that I'm hearing that teams will face. So if it's what to expect when connecting devices and switching carriers, I'm hearing there's complexity to Juggling multiple carriers internally, there's each one has their own way of doing business. but there's also difficulty in managing inactive devices proactively. So being able to make sure you don't have devices sitting on your RMA shelf or in the repair bay or in the scrap bay that have SIMs that you're still paying for when you could be using that on a new deployment.
AllenThat, that's absolutely correct. every software term, I don't know if this applies everywhere, right? But we always talk about greenfield deployments and brownfield deployments, right? So it's basically your install base versus the greenfield is the new thing that you want to go. In this world, you have to manage the entirety of the install base. It's just too big to say, I'm only going to worry about Greenfield, my new, the new thing. So it's, it is managing all of the ecosystem and then looking at that install base and saying, where can I be better?
RyanI would imagine if I were a company where I deploy cellular devices on behalf of my clientele, and I'm charging them for that service, if I can, as a point of customer service, say, we've identified these particular areas in which we can save you money, it looks like, it doesn't look like you're using these devices. Is that true? Let's go ahead and take those off your bill for the time being, or let's find out why you're not using them. Do you find that ever comes into play?
Allenwhat we find more than taking it off of an end customer's bill, because the end customer always knows, or they know what they're paying for, it's more than I'm no longer collecting revenue on these devices, but I'm still paying cost. Right where it turns around for the end customer is the other levels of monitoring
RyanOkay.
Allenthat can be proactive with your customer and say, Hey, I see that you've got these 5 devices that are going in and out of session. And, what's happening with your connectivity on these devices? How do I help you better manage your environment? Because now I'm seeing issues in how devices are connecting that I can then push out as a value add. And I'll tell you, customers love it when you come to them and say, Hey, look at what's happening with these devices, right? And what does that mean to your churn and your customer satisfaction? When you're able to be proactive in your management on your customer's behalf.
RyanSo Alan, why did you get into this business? Why did you create Simetric? These are all real problems, but what was the catalyst? Like, where did this all start?
AllenYou know, uh, So I spent, I did a stint at Cisco when Cisco acquired Jasper now control center. And I just, I got enthralled with the with how the IOT industry had come about I really got enthralled with, look, and I do believe, really deeply that the next major productivity increase for humanity is going to be tied to IOT as the device on the front end. Of all of this automation that's happening. And so I said, I've always wanted to get out and run my own thing and do my own thing. And I said, okay, you've got this ecosystem that we know is going to be incredibly impactful, but it's too fragmented today. It's just so hard to deal with multiple aspects. We haven't talked about, the analytics on the device payloads, right? We're just talking about the connectivity component. to me, it looked like a place where I could jump in and add value and help people not sub optimized deployments in this world.
Ryanwhen you're coming up with a product idea, you're addressing. Managing carriers. So talk to me about that adding additional layers of value. What does that process look like for you and your team? If maybe this analytics piece is a good example of what that you're already tied into the systems. We're already giving you the bare minimum of, helping you change plans. We're helping you adjust pricing. We're helping you manage and deactivate sims. But it goes beyond that. I'm hearing you're doing more. We're already here. So what else could we do? Could you give me an example of what that might be?
AllenSo where we're getting to at the end of the customer experience, customer journey is we're, we have a deep integration with service now. So it becomes not only about, looking at your connectivity and managing across multiple carriers, but it gets into really OT, IOT workflow. So it's this notion of how can I now take all this wealth of information and push it into broad workflow engines where people can take a device and when it goes to scrap, it automatically deactivates the cell. So it's really about getting to it's really getting to the level of asset management. So asset management and ticketing and things like that.
RyanThat, that's actually a really good point. Because, like here at Soracom, we have all of the APIs for deactivating, changing, locking, pausing, all of these things. But it still requires someone to click the button or they have to have a development team that knows how to go into their own systems and make that API call or that webhook call. what I'm hearing you do is... Working with some of these antiquated APIs at some of the larger carriers, using modern APIs, something like Soracom, and closing that gap between the IT and OT systems and leveraging those features,
AllenYeah. Yeah. It's in some cases with our customers, we're middleware, I'll say our average customer has 8 different carriers they're working with. So we're 6 to 8 different carriers. And when you think about having to deal with each different carrier's nuances, building an API gateway, yeah, that's a very long development process. You can plug into the Simetric APIs and we broker all the differences between the carriers.
RyanOkay. Okay. Yeah. It's like a skeleton key for going between.
Allenso in effect, you can develop, like you have someone that's doing a development effort to try to plug in feature sets, you can develop to the Simetric APIs versus developing to the 20 carriers you might have. An example of that is something that just launched with cradle point. So if you're inside of NetCloud Manager right now, you can click on the Simetric icon and enter your different carrier credentials and you're going to have a way to actually manage your sim states and see usage and see what rate plans things are on inside of NetCloud Manager.
RyanOh, that's really cool. It's the store within a store type approach.
AllenThat's right.
RyanSo is there anything that you wish more people knew about when it comes to managing or taking on that next carrier? Is there any advice that people should be bringing to their teams, words of wisdom, words of caution,
AllenI think more than anything it is about don't look at it as connectivity only. There are so many different aspects of a new deployment or a change or a migration and your strategy. It's about the connectivity. It's about the devices. It's about what's best for your end customers, be that internal or external. And that requires you to think about. End to end what does it look like to have an IOT life cycle, device life cycle, and how do I best manage that? The other thing I would say is a lot of people get caught up in, in product organizations looking at that device life cycle, but they don't remember connectivity. And so there's this huge bit of of value that you get from the data that, that. You can see from the carriers that should be integrated into anything you're talking about doing as it relates to new developments and new migrations.
Ryanletting the past inform the future with real world data?
AllenYes, that's right. So it is. So it's not, it really isn't just about how do you manage multiple carriers and removing that complexity is how do you manage your business in an effective way while utilizing the new place that you want to go, and that might be a new carrier that has advanced feature sets that has managed services that better support your business that has a lot of the great things that Soracom has in terms of your, your palate of being able to pick and choose what's, what is needed for your particular environment.
RyanI have the opportunity to sit on a sales call and something that. was said that I really liked is it was someone who has, tens of thousands of existing deployed sims between a couple of other different carriers and they're like, Oh, it's just so hard to make a change. We'd love to Make the leap. And someone on the call said, we do have a partner Simetric where they basically can allow you to add all of this advanced functionality that you like that Soracon provides and almost backwards compatible, allow you to have some of that same level of automation applied to the existing fleet. So you don't have to worry about replacing anything. We can just talk about current generation moving forward. Let's make positive change now. And that same interface would then pull in all of the same things from Soracom so you'd have one unified operational process that you could follow one set of tools. And I think the one thing that I didn't even think about it until you just mentioned it now, but it's really that it and OT conversation that needs to be brought in as well, it's not just the. Lifecycle management, but how can you trigger off of all of these additional events that are occurring? This is my last question for you, of all of the things that you've developed over the years of building the Simetric product line and platform. If you could go back in time, which feature do you offer now, that would have been a game changer earlier in the product's life?
AllenThat's, that is a great question. And that is, let me think about this for just one second.
RyanNot a problem.
AllenWe have built so many feature sets based on our customer's feedback. I'm a big believer in customer partner first. Our organization is really geared around listening and hearing what the real pain points are and I would probably say this interconnection with IT and we call them untethered assets.
RyanOkay.
AllenSo the asset visibility component. We really didn't get to that level until the last 12 months or so about how it can actually be used. It's like broader workflows. And, if we had started There, I think we would have had different discussions with customers earlier on that kind of wrap in this full life cycle view,
RyanThat is interesting. Especially if you've got product companies. How often are they consulting IT when it comes to these untethered assets? It's not on our network. So why would we need to deal with them?
AllenBut they're incredibly important to end customer's business
RyanAbsolutely.
Alleneverytime.
RyanI think it's fascinating because we consider ourselves middleware in many cases as well. Right? It's a relay between the device. And the final endpoint final resting place for that data. So other than just the connectivity now, there's how we route things to the cloud, right? Put things through VPN. There's all of those other pieces. Where it's not the thing that people are shopping for. It's the outcome that they're trying to achieve, but it's not the end goal. The end goal is still monitoring crops and detecting when to water them, detecting leaks and when to send a technician out, right? It's that's the interesting piece about being in that middle space.
AllenLook up all like what we. What our belief is, my belief specifically, is that cellular is a great way to transmit this data, and it's not just for devices that could not connect to a network, it's for devices that could, but it will suboptimize unless we make it easier, right? I believe in more and more SIMs in the world.
RyanWe had recent interview with a company that makes these little device rechargers and therefore like at libraries and campuses and the skybox skyboxes and like a stadium, in the VIP area is really cool looking little hexagonal devices. And it was 2 months before they went to manufacture that they realized. They were being blocked all of their best opportunities. The bigger the opportunity, the more likely that IT is we're not giving you access to our network. You can't get internet from us.
AllenYeah.
RyanAnd they ended up having, they had a USB port for charging on the, just on the back and their hub And they ended up getting a USB modem, got themselves some cellular service and they're like, this changed everything. IT didn't need to be involved in saying yes or no installation. We no longer needed installers to. Play it in any way, like configuring the IPS or anything. It just power to it and then mount it on the wall, plug it in and mount it. And you're off to the races and they like, and you're up and running. So it's interesting to see. In the 20 plus years, I've been building connected products on how cellular has gone from an expensive, luxury to something that's so ubiquitous, right? It's everywhere. It's out in those airwaves. And then even the carriers have, retool that used to be, you'd have to buy that same Verizon hotspot and have everything connect via wifi to it or integrating cellular was a whole nother Deal. And now you can get all of these pre certified devices, you can get these modules, you can add cellular to really tiny things with eSIMs and iSIMs now and the carriers actually are looking to just, it's just data, man. And it's an exciting time to be in this
Allenspace it is. We've actually crossed a point and I had a bigger, larger OEM tell me this, that because it is because of the amount of data now, it's specific use case, but it was easier. They were their customer support calls when people switched out their home router and it broke the connection to the device. We're high enough that just going to cellular decreased that support cost, right? So people are calling, I don't know what happened to my device. I'm like, oh it's not connected to your router anymore. Did you change your router? Yes. Oh here's where you go to change the connection in the device. So now it goes to your existing wifi. And so they just basically figured out, Hey, if I slam a SIM chip in these things, it is cheaper for me to pay for the cellular than it is to support people changing their home routers. Isn't that amazing?
RyanIt is. It really is. And it wasn't until the last year where I went from, I assumed cellular was just a commodity where it's just a dumb pipe to the internet and you're still on the hook for IPsec for everything. And it's still, it would still be a development lift and then getting to learn what the folks at Sorcom did by creating a cloud native cellular network. It blows my mind to this day. And like, where were you on these six projects that I launched where we were struggling with everything and managing multiple carriers was absolutely a thing because we had to have a Verizon for the rural applications for the pumps out in the oil, gas, oil and fuel. We had to support AT& T because of all of the corporate accounts because so many mobile handsets were in at a lot of these large corporations. So they wanted to be able to leverage their, sweet deal that they had. Through AT& T and just being stuck in the middle, having to have all of the different SKUs, have all of the different kitting, and that doesn't even include international, right? What an interesting time to be in the IoT space, to start seeing the technology fade into the background.
AllenJust a fascinating field. But the things that people are doing are so cool. We have we have customers that have bridles on horses to monitor. Yeah, to monitor the health of the horse to ankle bracelets and breathalyzers security systems, trail cameras. Then you've got the, what you would expect asset tracking and automotive management. So you've got all the big things, but you start looking around now and everything around you is connected to the internet, a lot of the things that are connected, you're looking at as a SIM chip, might be used for backup, might be used for primary.
RyanWell, Alan, this has been great. I think there's a lot of great info here that might have triggered some people out there who have had, or juggle more than one carrier. As the saying goes, the project roadmap to hell is paved with good intentions. Making changes to your cellular service provider does more than just impact the cost of IoT data and device coverage. It impacts so many other people within the company, including IT.
AllenThank you very much for having me. I really appreciate the chance to come and talk to you a little bit. Hopefully I've been able to share a little bit of insight in what we've learned here.
RyanAnd if people want to learn more about Simetric, where would they go?
AllenSimetric www dot Simetric dot com.
RyanAll right. But information will also be on the show notes and the additional links until then. This is what to expect when you're connecting. I'm Ryan Carlson, your host. And this was Alan Boone, CEO of Simetric until next time.
This has been another episode of what to expect when you're connecting. Until next time.
RyanWhat is Soracom to you?
Allenwe Simetric in a perfect world would not own any end customer conversation, right? I, we're a cog in a bigger wheel. So, you know, When I started thinking about Soracom You guys have a great offer and coupled with us, it makes it more powerful for your end customers and I would rather them know you than me, if that makes sense. I mean, we're like, we're, we're software people. It's it's about how do you how do you partner with people that make your product better? And I think Soracom does that..
