Webinar Plug and play IoT with IoT Cloud: questions & answers
We recently held a webinar on Telenor IoT Cloud which generated a lot of questions, here you can find some of those.
What is the biggest difference with buying Telenor IoT Cloud instead of buying from a general cloud provider, like AWS and MS Azure?
IoT Cloud is plug and play. The solution is already designed, architecture built and available to use right now. With cloud service providers, you will need to do all that work yourself.
Furthermore Managed IoT Cloud is a managed service, meaning it is supported and operated 24/7 and both maintained and continuously extended with new functionality. That is not part of the service from the general cloud service providers.
In general, what is the average time to market you see for customers implementing solutions/products based on Managed IoT Cloud?
On average, it takes 3-6 months from an idea to a commercially launched product, and this includes both device and app development. Customers using Cloud Ready Devices can be up and running within hours and have a pilot solution in place within weeks.
Is the IoT Cloud solution able to support geofencing?
Yes, geofencing is a built-in capability available both through the API and in App Board (the IoT Cloud web application). In App Board you simply mark the area you want to fence and decide what conditions shall apply and what actions to take, should the conditions be true.
How do you handle identification and certificates when you are using the CoAP protocol to send data?
We identify the devices by combination of IMEI and IMSI numbers that you enter when you register your device in IoT Cloud. In an integrated gateway we have a radius server which recognises the registered device and lets the data through. You do not need to store any certificates on the device.
What kind of alternatives do you have to send notifications or alerts directly from IoT Cloud?
In a basic setup you can set up webhooks, emails or set a given value to your resource. It is also possible to set up an smsc server to send sms.
How do you plan to make advancements to the platform and when?
IoT Cloud is continuously enhanced with new features and capabilities. A new release is issued every third week enabling fast response to market and customer needs.
IoT Cloud is based on AWS. So I assume it benefits from the datacenter infrastructure that provides high reliability, availability and scalability. Is it true?
Yes, that is fully true. IoT Cloud benefits from all this and that is part of the reason for our decision to base IoT Cloud on AWS.
Do I have to know in advance how many CPUs, storage, etc I need to run my solution smoothly?
No, IoT Cloud is built completely serverless using AWS services. This means IoT Cloud scales by usage and has no relationship to physical nor virtual servers. Therefore you can say IoT Cloud scales with the capacity of the whole AWS cloud. IoT Cloud scales as you grow and you don’t need to think of capacity.
What are the main challenges you have experienced during the customer implementation projects, perhaps related to, IT implementation, configuration, coverage etc?
Often customers are a little too eager to add features during the first launch/pilot phase. They have a great long-term vision, but are not always able to focus on a Minimal Viable Product (MVP), i.e. what are the most critical deliverables and use cases that needs to be fulfilled to launch a good-enough product.
Managed IoT Cloud can help enable customers to fast-track an MVP and from there, they can adapt it to customer and market feedback to secure a successful commercial launch.
IoT Cloud doesn´t only shorten time-to-market for the MVP, but also the time for adaptation, development, and launch of future versions as well as scaling up the roll-out of the service.
