Three Ireland has partnered with global specialist Cisco Jasper to extend its capabilities in the internet of things (IoT) space.
"The internet of things has the potential to redefine how we live and work and will create a huge amount of new business opportunities as well," says Nicola Mortimer, head of business products, marketing and operations with Three.
“We are just at the early stages today but growth will continue and will accelerate. We are seeing new businesses and use cases all the time. We decided that it was important for us to partner with an expert in order to facilitate our customers as they avail of these new opportunities.”
John Kafantaris, regional manager EMEA at Cisco Jasper outlines the origins of his company. "Ten years ago our CEO's Mercedes broke down. He had to bring the car a long distance to a garage only to find that the problem could have been fixed with a simple software update. He decided that there should be an easier way for cars and other pieces of equipment to get these updates and founded Jasper.
“When the company was acquired by Cisco in April of 2016 we had 3,500 enterprise customers around the world; today we have 9,000 enterprise customers with 40 million devices connected to our platform.”
Three customers who want to develop and launch IoT services will be able to do so using Cisco Jasper’s connectivity management platform.
Good news for Irish firms
The scale of the opportunity for Irish firms is huge, he believes. “The opportunities in the IoT domain are vast. We will see billions of devices connected in the near future and this will drive the creation of new businesses and new business models not seen today.
“The big driver is that product companies will want to be service companies. To do this they need embedded connectivity so that they can understand their customers and their behaviours and upsell services to them.”
Nicola Mortimer believes the transport sector will be among the first to feel the impact of the technology. “There will be more disruption in the automotive industry in the next five years than there was in the last 50,” she says. “We are already seeing IoT being used for infotainment, maintenance and monitoring applications. The next step up will be autonomous cars. Mainstream companies like Volvo are already developing autonomous.
“Where this is going to get really interesting is when the autonomous cars start talking to the cities they are driving around in. We’re going to live in a world where virtually everything is connected and this is going to produce vast amounts of data which will offer huge benefits to the companies involved as well as to their customers.”
It is also going to produce massive levels of complexity and this is where the Cisco Jasper solution comes in. “Our solution gives Three customers a platform for them to manage all their devices easily and simply,” says Kafantaris. “It is a very efficient and centralised way of managing them. We also offer them access to a partner ecosystem where they can avail of a range of different services to support their IoT needs. It’s not just about the platform, it’s about a full end-to-end service.”
Low cost and simple
Of critical importance to Three customers will be the cost efficiency of the services. “A key success factor for companies in the IoT space is the keeping operating costs low. By partnering with Cisco Jasper we will be able to offer IoT services to our customer in a way that allows them to manage their device lifecycle on their own terms and at a low operating cost.”
Simplicity is another important benefit. “With the Three IoT hub firms is able to get a consolidated view of all the devices they have out in the field, see which ones are active or inactive, what resources they are using and so on. They are able to switch them on and off remotely and can apply rules to them which will help manage costs.”
An example of such a rule would be a chip in a truck which travels from country to country. Connectivity costs can be reduced by switching the service or parts of the service on and off when the truck moves from zone to zone.
According to Mortimer, the other key advantage is the ability for small firms to scale solutions rapidly. “It doesn’t matter how small or large your firm is, you only pay for the service as you use it. It’s also fully automated so scale doesn’t add complexity. This means that you can start small with a just a few devices and scale up to millions as quickly as you like.”