From Efficient Asset Management to Building New Services and New Revenue Streams with Kaa
As one of the most technologically sophisticated industries with access to modern connectivity infrastructures and engineering talent, Telecom has been at the forefront of the Internet of Things innovations. However, there still remain challenges stemming from the sheer scale of IoT use cases for Telecom, such as overcoming the risk of overstretching resources and ensuring reliable quality of service.
In order to flourish in IoT, cloud, and AI intensive environments, telecom communication service providers (CSPs) will have to take initiative as leaders in technology development. Here are several types of IoT solutions enabled by Kaa that CSPs should add to their roadmaps when embarking on their IoT transformation.
One of the most common IoT Telecom use cases is asset management and remote system monitoring. By using an IoT platform like Kaa, telecom companies can connect their diverse physical assets to the cloud and remotely manage their operations, investigate malfunctions, run firmware upgrades, and keep track of inventory.
Telecom operators can also utilize their infrastructures to offer new services such as tailored consumer applications, wide-area IoT solutions, and IoT managed services. Using a highly versatile IoT cloud platform such as Kaa, any telecom operator can provide its own IoT solution to a variety of business verticals. Uniquely positioned with unlimited access to network infrastructure and vast pools of user data, CSPs can provide better performance, wider scale, and much better usability than other IT service providers.
Another opportunity for CSPs is to open up new revenue streams by providing edge computing infrastructure for over the top (OTT) service providers and application developers. Enabling cloud capabilities for network hardware such as modems, IP DSLMs, CMTSs or base stations, will allow telecom operators to offer their infrastructure as a valuable service from which consumer behavior patterns can be extracted and acted upon. This is where Kaa, as an enterprise cloud-native platform, can streamline the growth.
IoT is also a crucial part of cloud migration strategies for telecom companies. Apart from driving operational efficiencies, cloud helps CSPs modernize application infrastructures and deliver better customer experiences based on IoT, analytics, machine learning, and other tools. The only problem is that cloud providers may not be able to offer the best-of-breed IoT capabilities and solution flexibility that genuine IoT vendors have been polishing for years. That’s why in order to effectively combine cloud and IoT technologies, CSPs should strategically work on their partnerships as well as gradually internalize these core competencies.
Finally, CSPs can minimize operational costs by applying IoT technology for software defined networking and network function virtualization.
Using Kaa, cloud-based deployment, and container technologies, rolling out new services and deploying large-scale IoT solutions can be done in a fraction of a time it takes with legacy tools. This will provide a great edge to IoT-savvy CSPs, as they can grow beyond just maintaining their communications networks and emerge as big players in the IoT market.
In this dynamic world of digital innovations, telecom operators stand to gain from IoT as much as the IoT industry can benefit from the new advancements in Telecom. It’s clearly a win-win situation for all.
Running vast networks of telecom equipment puts serious pressure on telecom operator budgets. On top of this, many companies still rely on dated and difficult to maintain OSS solutions that run on unnecessarily complex workflows, lack modern device management capabilities, and, most importantly, are difficult to integrate with next-gen cloud applications.
That’s where a cloud-native IoT platform like Kaa can help telecom operators create a lean asset management solution that supports modern connectivity and integration protocols, offers unlimited flexibility for building custom-tailored application infrastructures, and provides a premium user experience for straightforward management and monitoring of devices in the cloud.
- Remote monitoring and troubleshooting
- Device management via digital twins
- Inventory tracking
- Predictive maintenance
- Fault management
- OTA updates, A / B testing of different device software
By using IoT, telecom companies have unlocked an incredible new dimension of services in continuous monitoring of connected devices. Some examples include smart home, smart car, fleet management, and smart city solutions. With their access to wide-area networks and the upcoming 5G rollout, telcos have become heavyweight players in this new dynamic market of IoT digital services.
But in order to capitalize on their favorable starting position, they must go through an across-the-board cloud and IoT transformation. Ultimately, communications infrastructures alone will not provide telecom operators with the growth that can be achieved by expansion into the IoT market.
- Remote device monitoring, management and analytics with the redistribution option
- Building a custom IoT platform on top of Kaa
- IoT services integration in the cloud
- User data analytics
- Continuous product improvement through identification of weak spots and typical usage scenarios
Modern IoT technology goes hand in hand with cloud computing for a number of reasons. Surely, it is possible to run a self-hosted IoT solution in your own datacenter and be well off without full-scale cloud adoption. But for telecom operators, scalability is the name of the game and that’s what cloud optimizes the best. In order to adjust IoT-powered services for a growing customer base, changing SLAs, or global expansion, CSPs will need to rely on cloud technology.
Another major benefit of cloud adoption alongside IoT is gaining access to the new generation of cloud apps for data analytics, navigation, augmented reality, AI, etc. They are trending now and will be the mainstream in a few years. Combining these apps with IoT device management capabilities will start a new wave of consumer-oriented digital transformation for CSPs.
- Cloud-native IoT platform that supports modern containerized software architectures
- Integration with cloud apps on popular cloud platforms, like Google Platform, AWS, or Microsoft
- Infrastructure, data, and applications migration to the cloud
- CloudOps setup and optimization
- Edge-to-cloud IoT applications
One of the great resources IoT provides telecom operators is the ability to deep dive into device, application, and user data analytics. By using an end-to-end IoT platform like Kaa, it is much easier to set up analytics dashboards that track device health, SLAs, performance KPIs, user engagement, and other types of data collected from a broad range of telecom assets. There’s no need to integrate multiple solutions for data collection, processing, and analytics. Instead, you can use a single interface of an IoT platform.
Furthermore, a cloud-native IoT platform offers superior flexibility compared to legacy OSS solutions and enables CSPs to create custom modules, replace parts with your existing tools, and fit them into existing cloud infrastructures. For example, you can use your favorite data engineering tool for data preprocessing or business intelligence module with your reporting templates on top of Kaa’s analytics. Or use Kaa as a data processing hub between your edge analytics infrastructure and cloud storage. The potential use cases are practically limitless.
- End-to-end analytics for Telecom devices, data, and applications
- Ready-to-go customizable dashboards
- Smart alerts and notifications
- Cloud analytics integration
- Edge analytics, smart gateways