Among the vendors seeing promise in SGP.32 is Aeris, a cellular connectivity platform provider that expects the eSIM standard to create an iPhone-like moment for the IoT market by making it seamless to switch IoT devices between different wireless carriers.
A new standard for remotely connecting IoT devices with eSIM technology is poised to open new opportunities for solution providers as vendors create new pathways for growth.
Among these vendors is Aeris, a San Jose, Calif.-based cellular connectivity platform provider that expects the SGP.32 standard to create an iPhone-like moment for the IoT market by making it seamless to switch IoT devices between different wireless carriers.
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“What this is going to do is shift the power balance away from the carrier and more towards the enterprise,” said Jon Connet, chief product officer of Aeris, in an interview with CRN.
Connet anticipates this power shift because of how the SGP.32 standard overcomes a previous limitation that only allowed devices with eSIMs—short for embedded SIMs, which contain subscriber information for cellular plans—to switch between carriers that were integrated at a technology layer called SM-DP+, which is important for remote SIM provisioning.
This previous limitation was due to the earlier SGP.02 standard, where customers have to approach their current operator “and tell them that you want to move to another carrier” if the two carriers are integrated, according to Connet. However, he added, carriers are “not super incentivized to have a broad range of those integrations.”
SGP.32, on the other hand, enables platforms like Aeris to “enable that switch out of the box for the customer without any friction from the carrier,” Connet said.
With seamless carrier switching, Aeris envisions a future in which its cellular connectivity platform acts as a marketplace where a partner or customer can buy IoT services from the providers of their choosing and pair those with connectivity offerings from different carriers depending on business and geographical requirements, according to the executive.
The company also offers its own value-added services for partners to sell, such as the Aeris IoT Watchtower solution for monitoring and analyzing cellular traffic.
“We’re seeing a tremendous amount of interest in the marketplace for these types of services because of the unlocking of that value. Just like how the iPhone blew up the app market,” Connet said.
Another vendor betting on SGP.32 to fuel future IoT is Thales Group. The French tech giant announced last month that telecom behemoth AT&T is integrating its SGP.32-compliant eSIM solution into the AT&T Virtual Profile Management for IoT solution.
Designed to speed up the deployment and simplify the remote management of large fleets of IoT devices, the Thales Adaptive Connect solution allows device manufacturers to “ship connected devices anywhere in the world with one single, pre-integrated eSIM from Thales, then seamlessly activate the correct local connectivity profile remotely.”
Rodrigo Ferreira, head of mobile connectivity solutions for North America at Thales, said that this benefits a plethora of companies, ranging from device manufacturers and contract manufacturers to distributors and solution providers because they no longer have to worry about pre-configuring devices for a specific region.
“That’s where SGP.32 brings that flexibility in a way that you can actually have a more global approach instead of doing a device that is actually locked for a given carrier or for a given region,” he told CRN in an interview.
The SGP.32 compliance will also give companies a better user experience and simpler logistics, which can bring down operating costs, according to Ferreira.
Carlos Gonzalez, research manager of industrial IoT and intelligence strategies at research firm IDC, told CRN in an interview that he believes the standard will spur greater adoption of IoT solutions, particularly when it comes to use cases involving remote operations.
“That’s going to impact how users can deploy IoT solutions in areas where there is a lack of infrastructure, where there is not that level of direct connectivity, things like agriculture,” he said.