IoT Device Management: Enabled by Infinity 

Istvan Lajtos

Head of Product Management

LinkedIn

Infinity is Eseye’s award-winning IoT Platform™. In combination with our global connectivity capability, it solves the conundrum of how to manage thousands of IoT devices – without being overwhelmed by cost and complexity.

The multi-provider challenge

At the start of an IoT journey, businesses must make crucial choices about connectivity. Often, cellular – with its reliability, security and quality of service – is selected as the best solution.

And this works fine for IoT proof of concept and initial rollouts.

As the estate scales up – with devices deployed in different countries or regions – businesses discover the downside.

Cellular connectivity is based on a geographical model, with country-based operators and regulators and increasingly onerous roaming restrictions. Traditional mobile network operators (MNOs) can’t provide the global, ubiquitous connectivity that IoT needs.

To overcome this piecemeal model, businesses often have to engage with multiple connectivity providers. This brings cost and complexity: multiple contracts, management platforms, support channels, invoices, APIs.

And no single view of the whole estate.

That’s where Eseye comes in

Eseye has deep IoT expertise, developed over many years in the field. Our goal is to orchestrate, automate and optimize connectivity for IoT. We work to achieve this by:

• Designing IoT devices that – despite the constraints of size, battery and compute power – operate in a secure and resilient way

• Providing near 100% seamless global connectivity through the AnyNet Federation, interconnects and agreements with mobile operators

• Operating the Infinity IoT Platform™ to manage devices in the field with sophisticated tools, analytics and integrations with other systems and platforms

The Infinity platform is scalable and configurable, capable of managing IoT estates that range from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of devices

Like all technologies, IoT doesn’t stand still. The design of devices, modems and SIMs advances year-on-year, bringing smaller sizes, improved performance and enhanced functionality.  

This can create challenges as your estate grows and changes over time. Many connectivity providers only support their own or a limited set of SIMs.

Infinity is SIM-agnostic.

It can manage all your devices regardless of the types of SIMs used. This includes all versions of Eseye’s AnyNet SIM up to the latest AnyNet+ eUICC SIM and the emerging software based version, the iSIM.

But Infinity can also manage your legacy devices – ones using another provider’s SIMs. If the SIMs are removable and it’s practical to swap them, AnyNet+ SIMs offer the best chance of global, ubiquitous connectivity for your devices.

If not, integration with the other provider’s systems can bring these devices into the Infinity fold. You can then access Infinity’s powerful management and reporting capabilities for all your devices.

Organize devices, streamline management

With Infinity you can add all the information you need to store about devices, such as the model and the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number. User-defined fields can be set up to hold any additional information that’s useful to you.

When your estate contains hundreds or thousands of devices, it’s helpful to organise devices into manageable sets. For example, you may want to group devices based on their location or services for billing. You might also want to create collections of devices for track and trace purposes.

If you use resellers and distributors, you can create individual portfolios of the devices assigned to each of these parties. These portfolios can be managed separately while you also retain an overall view of the complete estate.

Manage devices and SIMs from provisioning to end of life

Infinity provides tools to manage SIMs through the device lifecycle, from provisioning when devices are ready to go live through to terminating them at the end of the device life so that they can’t be used anymore.

While SIMs are active, Infinity ensures that the devices connect to the network that best meets their requirements. And it keeps them connected no matter what, which might mean steering to another network for better performance or localizing to avoid roaming restrictions.

Infinity supports bulk operations so that groups of devices can be updated or controlled together, helping to manage IoT estates in an efficient way.

Rich connectivity data for reporting, monitoring and troubleshooting

Infinity collects detailed connectivity metrics for every device. This includes network connections, location, events, data sessions, performance and throughput metrics. With this data, Infinity can:

• Use the connectivity rules engine to determine the best network for devices to connect to and when to localize or steer devices to different networks

• Trigger pre-configured alerts on threshold breaches or when unexpected behaviour is detected

• Provide reports and analytics to highlight trends and issues at an individual device level or aggregated for an estate

• Enrich device communications with connectivity data

• Troubleshoot connectivity issues remotely, saving costly engineer visits to remedy faults

Single, global, detailed invoices

Infinity’s detailed device connectivity data is used in billing to:

• Create accurate, detailed billing records for each device based on its location and the networks and services that it has used

• Generate a single global invoice for an IoT estate, simplifying financial management and administration

Eseye also offers a Bring Your Own Contract (BYOC) option if you have existing preferential rate plans with key carriers that you want to use within the Infinity ecosystem.

Use the Infinity interface or integrate to your own systems

The Infinity dashboard features a clean, intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), simplified menu structure and smart search facility to help manage your entire estate.

From the interface, you can perform all the management tasks you need, from administering users and accounts, to ordering and provisioning SIMs and managing them over their lifecycle using the alerting, reporting and analytics functionality of the platform.

The Infinity SDK and APIs enable seamless integrations to other platforms and systems to give you the flexibility to manage your devices in the best way for your business.

An evolving platform

Infinity is built on the AWS global cloud infrastructure, providing a secure, scalable and reliable platform on which our customers can grow and develop their own IoT programmes.

Our solutions evolve as new technologies, standards and best practices emerge in the industry.

For example, we developed the AnyNet+ eUICC SIM and a Remote SIM Provisioning (RSP) system so we can offer our customers the control and flexibility that come with the GSMA’s eSIM architecture.

We already provide remote management using the TR69 protocol for devices that incorporate our Hera routers. We will soon offer a new solution that uses the modern and flexible Lightweight M2M (LwM2M) protocol, vastly expanding the range of devices that we can support with enhanced remote device management.

Take control or hand over the reins

Many of our customers want to focus on their business goals – gaining insights and value from the data collected from their IoT devices. These customers want connectivity to work like magic – devices connecting out of the box and staying connected wherever they go or whatever the circumstances.

Other customers like to have more oversight and control of the devices and their connectivity.

Wherever you are on this spectrum, we can meet your needs:

• Our experienced support teams can manage your devices through their entire lifespan
• Infinity’s intuitive self-service interface enables your teams to monitor and manage your devices
• Seamless integrations using the Infinity APIs lets you manage your devices through other platforms and systems

Blending these options provides the ultimate choice and flexibility for how you want to manage your IoT estate.

Istvan Lajtos

Head of Product Management

LinkedIn

Istvan’s telecommunications career spans more than twenty years in a variety of roles, including product management, technical account management and marketing. Istvan leads on product management with expertise in communication technology strategy development, smart city technology and IoT, 4G to 5G mobile network evolution to secure content delivery.