Saicom’s locally-developed mobile data access point name (APN) platform Saicom.Connect allows businesses to analyse their mobile data usage more effectively, allowing better insights into data usage and ultimately creating cost savings for organisations.
According to Greg de Chasteauneuf, chief technology officer at Saicom, the decision to develop this platform in-house was born out of frustration when evaluating off-the-shelf platforms in the local and international market.
“We found that most of these systems did not give administrators the real-time insights into what applications their staff were consuming,” he says. “Our platform is focused on providing administrators with the tools to control and reduce non-business critical applications and therefore reduce overall mobile data spend.”
Saicom also noted that another significant shortcoming was in the disconnect of most device provisioning systems from the APN management platform; this compounds when dealing with thousands of M2M (Machine-2-Machine) devices.
According to de Chasteauneuf, Saicom has baked in OTP (Over the Air Provisioning) into the Saicom.Connect platform, which allows administrators to control and manage their IoT devices directly from a single pane of glass.
“Our customers can purchase a block of data at whatever size they want, and we provide a service that is not linked to any specific cellular provider,” he says. “We can either link the data block to existing SIM cards or issue new ones for the chosen provider. This means that the organisation will no longer be linked to extended, single-user contracts but can buy data amounts in bulk and allocate to departments and users as they wish.”
Customers then connect to their networks via private or public APN, as required. “For most SME’s, it is more cost effective to link to Saicom’s public APN, which will give them high security and availability while remaining in complete control of allocations and usage. For companies with more users and sophisticated in-house networks, we can set up a private APN which allows their users to link directly to their internal networks.”
Once linked via the APN to the Saicom.Connect platform; the platform allows for the organisation to then monitor and allocate the data per user. If a user is consuming data at a high rate, the business can drill down into the usage and see what they are using the data for and analyse whether it is for business-critical applications or not.
“For example, you might find that a user or department is consuming a significant amount of their data portion on apps such as video streaming or social media,” says de Chasteauneuf. “You could then either throttle the usage of those apps or block them entirely.”
Other unique benefits are the ability to monitor usage and reallocate where required if a user is going to run out of data, but still needs more data before month end to perform critical functions. The Saicom.Connect platform reveals predictive patterns, which allows for companies to track employee usage and allocate data amounts accordingly on an individual basis.
For HR, it is as easy as a single click to remove an employee who has left the company from using the data pool. These changes are immediate, eliminating the risk of a disgruntled former employee running up an enormous data bill before HR removes him from the system.
“We also provide a one-month settling-in period, so customers can get a feel for where their data is being used, and how much is a realistic amount to start with,” says de Chasteauneuf. “For our resellers, we provide a ‘white label’ product which can be branded with their logo and makes it look more seamless within their network.”
An additional useful feature includes the ability to pair a SIM card to a specific physical device. de Chasteauneuf cites an example of this as a site where a router uses a SIM card for connectivity, but employees were removing the SIM to put it into their own devices to use the data for private purposes. By linking the SIM to a device, this security flaw is removed as the SIM can only be used in that specific router.
Data packages start at 5GB per month and can scale to give organisations flexibility and choice around their data needs.