The Business of IoT Connectivity | Altaworx's Forrest Derr | E202

you are listening to the iot for all media network hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the iot for all podcasts the number one resource and publication for iot i'm your host ryan chacon if you are watching this on youtube we'd really appreciate it if you would like this video and subscribe to our channel if you are listening to this on one of the podcast directories please feel free to subscribe so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available today's episode we have forester the president of ultaworks very fantastic company they focus on white labeled hosted voice over ip solutions that include connectivity building platforms compliance you name it they can kind of handle it for you on this episode a lot a lot of good stuff discussed around the connectivity side so we talked about pricing models business models buying rate plans how that all works advice for companies purchasing data how to manage multiple carriers and then also just general challenges in the space as it connects to the connectivity the communication side of things so i think you'll get a lot of value out of this but before we get into it if any of you out there are looking to enter the fast growing and profitable iot market but don't know where to start check out our sponsor leverage leverages iot solutions development platform provides everything you need to create turnkey iot products that you can white label and resell under your own brand to learn more go to iot changes everything dot com that's iot changes everything dot com and without further ado please enjoy this episode of the iot for all podcasts welcome for city fall podcast thanks for being here this week glad to be here appreciate the internet absolutely it's great to have you looking forward to this conversation let's kick it off by having you give a quick introduction about yourself to our audience yeah my name is forrest uh been with the company for seven years now i was a customer of the company of ultraworks for about 12 or 13 years before i came and joined them i tell everybody that they were such a good company that couldn't help but join them i had to leave my former job and move over here but joined the company seven years ago um and started in the i.t side of the business so building out data centers and building out one of our first iot solutions which is lte failover and so i got to cut my teeth on some applications and development working with our engineers to launch solutions and um for our audience who may not be as familiar with ultraworks tell us a little bit about kind of what you all do and the role you play in iot yeah so ultraworks is a carrier we sell mobility as well as hosted voip but on the iot side we've been able to we're one of the first companies that signed up with att partner exchange to be able to have access to the jasper platform to be able to utilize data plans small data plans and have those scale up as data usage is consumed and so we've we've had a lot of experience in the mobility space as well as the iot space we've got customers in 43 different states as well as some in canada mexico and overseas in asia so and do you have any types of use cases or kind of verticals that you specialize or focus in or is it kind of across the board yeah it's kind of cost to board because we're really focused on the connectivity uh we help people get connected to other companies to help them you know leverage their solution we don't necessarily develop solutions per se but it's really across the board whether it's scooters or horse tracking or lte failover pipeline replacement it's really anything around iot connectivity and when you say failover what does that exactly mean for our audience to understand yeah so failover of what it means to us is a backup internet connection so if you have a fiber connection and you inevitably have a farmer that digs up the fiber line with his backhoe cuts off your connection uh lte failover is a way to leverage the lte network to pick up and run the internet connection for that office until that fiber connection comes back online gotcha okay perfect um so today's conversation i i know we have a number of topics that we we wanted to kind of cover and talk about around the connectivity side and pricing side business model side of iot and connectivity and one of the first questions i want to ask you is if you could talk a little bit to our audience about pricing models business models around the connectivity side so so what are the common kind of pricing models that we see um and and just is high level that for us so that we can you know kind of start from there yeah i think the biggest thing to think about with pricing is you don't have to price things out the way you purchase them so one of the things when we're consulting companies on building out their iot solutions most everybody wants to try to get the carrier to provide the rate plan that they need specifically to sell their customers but that's not necessarily how you have the best way to do it the best way to do it is to get aggressive rate plans with your carrier and then derive slash develop your own rate plans for your customers and those rate plans really are dependent on the solution so we've got zero kilobyte rate plans you know all the way up to you know 500 kilobytes a mag all the way up 30 40 50 gigs so it really depends on the application and what i encourage people to do is sell based off what their customer needs don't sell it based off how you buy it from the carrier so so i mean i know a lot of times when we've spoken to other connectivity companies or just our own research in the market we see a lot of companies buying rate plans and then marking them up as a way to kind of make their margins you're suggesting that not be the approach that companies lead with or take and also companies that are looking for connectivity should they be kind of avoiding those potential situations as well yeah because the challenge is if you buy rate plans and mark them up you're limiting the margin you can make based off what how the carrier will sell your data and so for example on our iot platform i think we've got like 15 different rate plans well you know depending on what the customer set is and depending on what their need is they we may only give the customer five of those rate plans or six of those rate plans right and particularly in the lte failover space so one of the ways that we've been able to leverage lte failover is to provide a zero kilobyte plan to customers and so they pay for an active sim so they'll pay 15 a month or whatever for an active sim but we're only charged as a carrier customer for a very small fee a fraction of that 15 for that sim to be active that's where you can make money on the breakage and then you can charge them usage on top of that so again don't restrict your business model to how you can buy the data figure out creative ways to make margin and when you're talking to companies and they come to you with the solution that they're either building to sell or that they are looking to adopt and you're starting the conversation around rate plans you're talking around the conversation around which ones are appropriate how do you kind of handle that conversation and at the same time what should companies coming to companies like yours have prepared to better understand the appropriate rate plans that are right for them or what kind of information they need to supply a company like yours to make sure that they have the options presented to them that are most appropriate to get the best cost for their solution and not in a sense over have any overkill yeah so the first thing is is lots of questions that we have so when a customer comes to us we have lots of questions to understand how they're going to be utilizing that data what is their typical usage that they're seeing in in their solution and you know obviously geography and where they're selling that data for us you know what we want to understand is you know what is their typical framework for that customer for those solutions um do they need to have a zero kilobyte plan and charge the customer or do they need to have a 500 kilobyte plan so as much data as we can get from them we can help guide them along the journey to make sure that they're making the right bike plans it's it's amazes me when i've had very very large customers i mean fortune 500 customers that don't have good rate plans um it's it's it's astonishing to me but there are large companies out there that have huge volumes but the carriers don't help educate those large customers on how to buy rate plans i have one that has two rate plans and millions of sims and we've talked them through the process of renegotiating with their carrier and getting that carrier to give them multiple rate plans to be able to make money on the breakage and why is that usually the case as far as why are those not presented to them or not available well the carrier doesn't present them because they would rather make the margin themselves they'd rather make the breakage um and the larger companies that we've come across in in talking to them they don't know what they don't know you know they feel like they're getting the best deal because they're a really large company and they have a large volume but that's rarely the case so so for companies out there that are looking to purchase data um what advice do you have for them on how to go about that and how to do it the most effectively um and efficiently with the organizations either they work with or the carriers they work with on the other side you know i think the big thing is to get lots of uh input from other companies so don't just rely on the carrier directly talk to other companies like ulta works or another competitor of ours and see what's out there in the marketplace uh one of the challenges is again you don't know what you don't know and if you just say give me the best deal on a 20 gig plan well you may need a 20 a 10 a 5 and a you know 2 gig plan to be able to scale that business and make money on breakage so my advice is to get advice and then find out what's out there in the marketplace right and um aside from how data is being purchased are there other factors that are influencing kind of the margins and um that decision making process uh yes it's it's also how you optimize with the carrier so on different platforms so jasper's one is one platform that att uses and there's some other creators t-mobile i think has started using them and there's a lot of international carriers but that the jasper platform will allow you to optimize and change the rate plans all the way up to the end of the bill cycle and so if you buy data and strictly markup rate plans then you're limiting yourself on how much margin you can make so you could have a customer that buys a 2gig plan and they only use you know 50 megabytes and with the jasper platform you could use some automated tools that companies like we provide and other companies that will actually optimize your carrier rate plan all the way to the last minute before the end of the bill cycle to get you the lowest bill possible so instead of taking buying a two gig plan and marking it up you're buying a 50 meg plan and still charging the 2gig price gotcha okay and um how often are i guess there's two sizes right there's companies like yours who are um kind of bringing the connectivity as an option to purchases and the companies that are purchasing the connectivity from companies like yours when it comes to managing multiple carriers how does that kind of work on potentially both sides of it is is there a difference between how that's managed on both sides and what kind of things should be taken into account when you're getting into multiple carriers as opposed to focusing on one yeah multiple carriers adds a whole other layer of complexity because of the way they sell the data so some carriers sell it based off consumption so then you're just a matter of making your own rate plans there are no rate plans you're just paying based off the data that's consumed across the aggregate um so it is a challenge um it especially from a standpoint of figuring out how to build your customers so especially if you have a model where you're charging your customers the same rate plan great plans across multiple carriers you've got to make sure you're making the margin but there are tools out there there's a company called amop out there that has a platform that allows you to manage multiple carriers in one dashboard and so you could manage verizon thing space att intelligence you know t-mobile jasper att jasper all in one platform to give you a holistic view of how your data is being used and how you can optimize your bill with those carriers gotcha okay that makes a lot of sense um and one of the other questions i want to ask you which there's a couple different pieces we can dive into here around challenges that you've seen kind of from your angle and as and and same side um or and as the angle from from customers that you work with what are some of the biggest challenges you've seen on the connectivity side of things in iot let's just start high level there just kind of what would you say um kind of that i think it depends on the iot solution so we've seen a lot of people with fixed devices in iot so it's like a generator or lte failover and trying to find the best carrier for that device in that physical location is definitely a big challenge if it's a gps tracking device that's moving around you know there's not as much issues as far as choosing a carrier because it can pull the data and then you know spool it back up when you when it gets to a sell signal again but fixed iot devices and choosing the right carrier that has the connectivity that's required from a cellular strength standpoint is probably one of the biggest challenges we've seen and and how what is the advice to kind of um working through that thought process and overcoming that kind of challenge since obviously asset tracking is a very big area from from an iot standpoint the environment the um scissors the yeah the devices itself varies so greatly right um you're moving indoor to outdoor potentially you're in roller areas you're in you know it just you're in different environments and it's very tough to align the right connectivity which influences the end cost of these solutions pretty greatly to make it something that company can justify adopting or not so how do you kind of overcome that kind of challenge yeah so it's about looking at the devices that you're going to choose because a lot of devices out there have the ability to have two sim cards and two carriers and you know again there's a there's a cost component to the device but then there's also a cost component to deploying that device and then maintaining that device right and so what we have seen is people make sacrifices on the front end for the upfront cost device to be able to have two carriers so that they can deploy one device with two sim cards with two carriers anywhere and not have to go back and forth and try to figure out which carrier is the best and so we've seen a lot of success from people that are doing that and you know what they do is they have both sims active figure out which one's the best once it's in the field just deactivate the sim that's not the best and move on and just don't worry about that sim card anymore so absolutely okay that makes tons of sense um one of the other questions i had was um i imagine at times it can be a challenge to get accurate usage data from carriers whether that's on your end or your customer's end how do you approach that and what what i guess to start off with what is that challenge really like and then how do you kind of overcome and handle that to ensure that you have the most accurate data available to choose whether it's the best plan make adjustments in real time so that your your customers get the best um costs and prices in the day yeah and it's actually twofold it's it's not only getting data from the carrier to make sure it's accurate but it's also making sure you have accurate data to build your customers for the right rate right so we've been a lot of applications where people are not getting accurate data from the carrier therefore they're paying a higher price but then they're not charging their customers as much either particularly in the lte failover space so one of the ways to do that is to leverage a solution where you can have apis that connect to the carrier to get real-time data you know a lot of carriers will provide data via ftp reports but those may be delayed you know 5 hours 10 hours sometimes 24 36 hours and so you can't just rely on one source of data not all carriers provide multiple ways but a lot of carriers do provide multiple ways to get data so i'll give an example a t on the intelligent side which is technically not iot but yet people use mobility uh systems for iot applications whether it's classified as that or not you know there's like three different sources to get data there's a mubu report there's a ftp report and then there's data you can get via ftap or apis what we have decided to do is we've leveraged apis and a portal to pull all three of those sources in and look at which data consumption is the highest and use that because we found that not all of them are 100 accurate and they're not not individually they're not accurate more than one or the other so you really have to look at all three of these data sources combine them together and figure out which one has the highest data usage and when you mention portal i know there's kind of the side where you're able to interact with and kind of see the data but what about from the the customer side being able to access and manage the connectivity themselves is that something that your customers often do and find beneficial or is that something that is kind of usually reserved and handled and managed by you all so that it's less work and um uh kind of things to worry about for for the customer itself so it depends on the customer i mean if it's a customer that only has 10 15 devices typically they're not going to want to manage it but the larger customers you know a couple hundred even 50 they're going to want to manage and have access to that device so we propose and and want our customers to have a portal where they have management access to activate and deactivate their sims you know one side of that says well why would i want to give customers active you know ability to activate and deactivate i want to be in control of that but then what is the cost of having to maintain the support staff to be able to respond to those requests and do those types of things so our focus has been building portals where our customers can leverage the apis we give them access only to their sims that they're in control of and then they can activate deactivate suspend retire whatever they want to do to them at their convenience so and are there other types of or other parts of the process in general when it comes to connectivity that are that have i guess as of late been more optimized or automated in order to help reduce labor needs or are there other areas that you know i guess that have been challenges that have now kind of been work to overcome to help reduce those needs yeah i think on the carrier optimization side you know there's ways that you can um manage the rate plans that you're being charged from your carriers and automatically make changes i can tell you that when we first started out you know gosh it was 2016 somewhere around there uh i was i was actually in the seat of manually optimizing sim cards on the jasper platform which was a tedious process of downloading the spreadsheet running through some algorithms making the changes uploading the csv now all that stuff can be automated and so with leverage of apis uh you can automate not only the carrier side but also the billing side so you can calculate usage charges and push billing to various billing platforms via those apis from from your conversations with with the part or companies that you work with um are there any other areas that kind of continue to cause headaches for for customers you that that you engage with and i mean from your conversation today and the conversation i've had in the past the connectivity management side of things has evolved a ton over recent years and made things much more easy to adopt and understand made things more cost effective etcetera but do you still see any outlying areas of concern or areas that kind of pose challenges still for customers that you have conversations with um throughout their kind of adoption of these solutions um i really think there's even though there's automated tools for sim card management and billing i still think there's a lot of opportunities for people to use these tools effectively not that they're not available but how they use them effectively to make sure they're billing all their customers for all the active devices make sure that billing and for all of the usage so we're still seeing i i to this day i have people come to me and you know they tell me they've got somebody in their office that make sure everything gets built to their customers and inevitably when we run an analysis and figure out how many active sims they have versus how many they're billing they're always short and so uh on the carrier side there's a lot of ways to automate a lot of people are doing a good job on there but i think on the billing side there's still room for improvement gotcha fantastic last question i have before we wrap up here is for our audience out there who is looking into connectivity um and wants to just make sure they're prepared what is the best advice you have for companies looking to kind of go down that conversation adoption journey for the connectivity piece of an iot solution yeah definitely look at multiple carriers and i definitely look at how you can buy data flexibly again don't get stuck in the rut of trying to buy a rate plan based and sell to your customers based off that rate plan i wouldn't even tell the carrier what you're selling your customers what rate plans you're selling your customers get them to provide the various options and let yourself work your way around to what you need to charge your customer so okay fantastic and for audience out there wants to learn more about uh kind of what you all have going on touch base maybe follow up with questions what's the best way to do that yeah you can email me at f dur f d e r r at ulta works a l t a w worx.com or go to ultaworks.com fantastic well this has been a great conversation for us thanks so much for your time um connectivity is an area that we're trying to expand our conversations around we're starting a new series focused solely on connectivity specific topics that we're going to hopefully launch in the coming months so we'd love to have you back and other members of your team even to talk more about very niche connectivity focused questions and topics that come up and just just share more knowledge well let us know be happy to be a part of it fantastic well thanks so much for your time we appreciate it thank you appreciate it all right everyone thanks again for watching that episode of the iit fall podcast if you enjoyed the episode please click the thumbs up button subscribe to our channel and be sure to hit the bell notifications so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available other than that thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time

2022-07-19 13:11

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