For many MVNOs, the next growth opportunity may not come from adding more traditional mobile subscribers.
It may come from the connected devices their business customers are already deploying.
IoT creates an interesting opportunity for MVNOs with an existing enterprise customer base. Connectivity is naturally part of the equation, but providing a complete IoT service requires much more than SIM cards and data.
Customers need visibility of their connected devices, usage and networks. They need monitoring, alerts, automation, reporting, integrations and increasingly better ways to understand what is happening across large connected environments.
Building all of this internally can require significant investment in software, integrations and operational resources.
This is one of the reasons we developed Netquori Connect.
From connectivity provider to IoT service provider
Netquori Connect is a connected operations platform built for both enterprises and service providers.
For an enterprise, it provides one environment for managing connected operations.
For an MVNO or other service provider, the same technology can become the platform behind the IoT services they provide to their own customers.
This allows an MVNO to build an IoT proposition without having to become a software company itself.
The MVNO keeps its customer relationships and commercial model while Netquori Connect provides the technology layer behind the service.
The platform brings together connectivity management, device operations, monitoring, automation, analytics, integrations and multi-customer management.
This also means the opportunity is not limited to one IoT vertical. The same underlying platform can support different connected environments and customer requirements.
Adding intelligence with Netquori Copilot
Managing IoT at scale also creates another problem: more devices generate more operational information.
Netquori Copilot is integrated directly into Netquori Connect to help turn that information into something operational teams can actually use.
Instead of requiring teams to manually search across different systems and datasets, Copilot can help analyze the connected environment, investigate issues, identify anomalies and find optimization opportunities.
We are also bringing external network intelligence into the platform.
Mobile networks do not remain static during the lifetime of an IoT deployment. Operators announce 2G and 3G sunsets, technologies change, networks are acquired and roaming environments evolve.
Netquori Connect monitors information about network changes globally and can inform users when developments may be relevant to their connected operations.
For an enterprise operating thousands of devices across multiple countries, knowing that a network sunset has been announced is useful.
Knowing which part of your own deployed environment may be affected is much more useful.
A different route into enterprise IoT for MVNOs
We believe this creates an interesting model for MVNOs.
Instead of investing heavily in developing an IoT platform before knowing how quickly the business will grow, an MVNO can start with its existing enterprise customers and expand from there.
The service can grow from connectivity into device management, operational monitoring, automation and intelligence.
And because the underlying platform is already there, the MVNO can concentrate on the part it knows best: its market, its customers and the services it wants to build around them.
This is also an important part of how we see Netquori Connect developing.
We don’t see it only as a connectivity management platform. The direction is towards an operating layer for IoT, something enterprises can use to run their own connected operations and something service providers can build their own IoT businesses on top of.
IoT is one area where we believe existing MVNOs have a particularly interesting opportunity.