How AT&T is Mastering Global IoT

Hi. This is Nick Earl, CEO of SI, and this is the one. This is the podcast. You'll hear me say this a couple of times, in the podcast that's coming up now. This is the one I've been waiting for for well, let's just say almost two years because it was almost two years ago that AT and T and SI started talking together about an idea, an idea that actually maybe what we could do is enable AT and T to have a new value based offering which would enable global connectivity for their customers with a lot of benefits. And maybe that platform could be SIs. And as I say, almost two years later, here we are. Mobile World Congress announcing the fact that AT and T are white labeling SIs platform to create their new global IoT solution called Global SIM Advanced. It's been an amazing journey with lots and lots of meetings, lots of contract negotiation. But finally, with the big public announcement, you're gonna hear Mike Van Horn, who is the AVP of IoT product management for AT and T over in Atlanta, talking about the whole background to this, why AT and T are doing it, what's being announced and the benefits to the customers and a little glimpse into the future of where this can go. So with all of that as a setup, I'm going to hand over now to my podcast with Mike Van Horn, who runs the product side of IoT for AT and T. And I think you're really going to enjoy this, and I think it's a pretty significant announcement for IoT in the industry. Here we go. So, welcome to the IoT Leaders Podcast. Thanks, Nick. Really excited to be here. Appreciate you inviting us. Yeah. Well, we're really, really glad you've been here. You know, we've done over fifty of these podcasts. I just found out recently that we have listeners in ninety three countries, which is amazing. But this is the podcast that I've certainly wanted for a long time. You and I have been talking to each other. The organizations have been talking to each other for quite a while, well over a year. And the goal was always the launch of something big between us. And this podcast is part of that launch. Great to see you and be looking forward to this for a long time. So let's dive in. And Mike, let's start off with who you are and your role. Awesome. Yeah. So I've been with AT and T for a little over twenty four years. Started right out of college with AT and T, and I've led teams in consumer, business, across sales, marketing, and operations. But the last six I spent in IoT, and this is by far my my favorite assignment to date. So today, I lead the product organization at AT and T for our IoT connectivity and solutions. You can think about everything from connectivity to platforms, professional services, and then full end to end solutions, all with connectivity at the heart. My team is one of the best, if not the best in the business, and I'm honored to lead them. There we go. Nice to have a proud leader on the call. And I've met many members of your team, and they are absolutely great. We're gonna get into that. Before we do, let's take a step back. I mean, everyone's heard of AT and T. The IoT is a piece of AT and T's business. Is there any sort of high level sizing or or or description or explanation of AT and T's IoT business to put into context what we're about to talk about? Sure. I'd be happy to. So for some of your global listeners and watchers, we invented the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell. So we've been doing this a long time. But from an IoT perspective, to your point, we're one of the largest IoT connectivity providers in the world. We have more than one hundred and forty million connections on our network. Everything from sixty of the top US automotive brands to innovative healthcare startups, we connect it all, everything in between. And, you know, really and truly the advantages are the strength and security of our network. That's what AT and T is known for. But probably more important is the knowledge and experience of our team members. So not just my team, but the broader work called AT and T connected solutions inside of AT and T. This group has been doing IoT for a really long time, much longer than I've been here, and they're some of the smartest people that I've been around. And as you know, IoT connectivity can be very complex and challenging, and these folks make it look easy oftentimes. So, yeah, this is a great spot to be. Yeah. And just in case there's anybody who doesn't know and are thinking, well, what are they referring to? Because as I said, this is the podcast is a series of things that are released, including press releases, analyst briefings and whatever, but a new offering from AT and T, which we're going to unpack called Global SIM Advance, which is essentially SI's platform white labeled by AT and T. But You're stealing my thunder here a little bit. I know. I know. Well, it's so good. Thought we would say it twice. Yeah. Let's do it. But the reason actually I did that, other than the outrageous attempt to say it as often as possible. No. The reason I did that was because there's a lot of change. You talk about the complexity, that's actually the reason we started the IoT Leaders podcast series four years ago, to demystify IoT. But also there's been a lot of change. And you know, the historically, I've talked a lot on the podcast about, you know, over eight hundred operators essentially with the same business model as to take their own SIM to market via platforms such as Cisco Jasper or Ericsson, now Arris platform and several others. But essentially their own SIM with Direct Connect and roaming agreements. But the new capabilities, the new standards in the GSMA are enabling interoperability and multi operator solutions such as eSIM, EUICC, eSIM orchestration, SGP thirty two, and that's enabling true global connectivity. So so from your point of view, these these could you comment a little bit on these trends and what implications they have then for your business and in particular for for your customers? Yeah, absolutely. So I mentioned that I started my career in consumer and did a little bit of cellular in enterprise. And, you know, there are complexities when you think about connecting smartphones and tablets and those sorts of devices. But in the IoT space, there's nothing, I haven't encountered anything that's more complex when you think about connectivity and the solutions. From the type of module, the device, the firmware and software that are running, the networks, whether it be domestic or global, regulatory environments, and the list goes on and on. And so more than ever, customers of all sizes, biggest of the big and the smallest of the small, are looking for elegant, simple connectivity that just works. And it needs to work anywhere in the world, and you know, this is a lot easier said than done, as you well know. And in many cases, as you mentioned, customers look to a multi carrier strategy. In the least complex scenarios, they ship devices with three, four, five SIM cards in them and try until they get a hit. And in more complex scenarios, as you mentioned, you have eSIM, EUICC. But, you know, the problem there is that oftentimes you have to have a really big department of folks to manage those sorts of things. And you have to have access to tools and technology that only, you know, large telcos have. And so there are very few customers in the world that can effectively do it themselves. You Some of our largest automotive customers, they can pull it off, but a lot of others can't. And even some that do don't want to. They want simplicity. And as you mentioned, the evolution of the eSIM standards and development of automated eSIM orchestration platforms is making it possible for companies of all sizes to have that kind of ubiquitous, resilient connectivity. And so that's the trend, and AT and T intends to be at the forefront of that trend, delivering for customers, along with great technology collaborators like SI. You know, one of the comments that just before we do the formal reveal of what we're announcing, despite me already doing a little scoop earlier on, one of the things that we've talked about on this is this issue of global versus regional because, you know, by far the vast majority of IoT right now isn't truly global, single product SKU. And people have said, well, you know, if we've been doing this for so long, you mentioned we've doing it for a while, know, even before it was called IoT and it was called M2M, why suddenly is everyone talking about global? One of the ways that we have answered that, which is, and I like to answer it at least, is to say, you know, if you were a company, as you say correctly, of any size, a company of any size and you're manufacturing and you're you got supply chain, you got distribution, you got installation and ongoing operations, the cost of having to maintain different SKUs for connectivity to, you know, build open devices with SIM slots to actually put different SIMs in around the world because you couldn't do truly global from a single SIM, to maintain all the admin, to manage all the operator contracts, all the different pricing, different portals, no single source of truth. But, you know, if someone said to you, what if you didn't have to do that? I always like to say, show me one customer who wouldn't think that was a good idea. And the fact that it hasn't been done to a large extent so far is not because people didn't want it because the economics are so compelling. It's that it wasn't possible previously. So they don't want to maintain ten, twelve different operator contracts and have a team of thirty people, which we see all around the place. Got thirty people banded. You know, they're acting enterprises acting as an MVNO. Don't want to do it, but they've had to do it because you couldn't actually get it all from one place. So with that, as a setup, what are AT and T and SI announcing at Mobile World Congress this year? So drum roll. Yeah, is that we're We're announcing Global SIM Advanced. And so this is in addition to our already robust IoT connectivity portfolio. Know, today, our AT and T Global SIM, our standard IoT offering, has roaming agreements all over the world. And so this is this is more than that. This goes well beyond. So what we're talking about here is a multi MZ eSIM with automated orchestration and single pane of glass connectivity management. And you're buying this from AT and T. And so you have the security, the know how, and the resources of AT and T along with the technology and network relationships of SI. And so it's really and truly the best of both worlds. Gives customers access to simple, resilient, redundant connectivity, gives them the best coverage possible, it gives them localization for performance or regulatory compliance reasons, gives them insurance if they're concerned about network longevity, whether it be an AT and T or a roaming partner. And so really and truly, it is the best possible connectivity solution for an IoT deployment. And particularly if, to your point, you know, customers want one SKU that they can send anywhere in the world and it'll work. And, you know, you talk about operational efficiencies, that's really how you get there. Yeah, and that's a lot of money, all that admin and a complexity that we've been talking about. Maybe just before we go to the next part of this is just double click on one component of it. You talked about localization and we've used the phrase federated localization. I know that you have some pretty strong views with regard to why localization might be needed. And so a part of that is the use case, part of that is regulatory around the world, and also part of it is the future in terms of five gs and what's going to happen at the edge. Maybe you could just comment a little bit the future need for localization, current and future need for localization. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, we all know that roaming is a very powerful, elegant, and simple way to expand your footprint. But there are a lot of reasons why roaming won't solve the needs of many today and even more tomorrow in IoT. And so the first one is anybody that's doing global IoT deployments understands that there are some countries in the world that have very strict regulatory conditions that prohibit permanent roaming, that require localization and a local MZ on a device after a certain period of time, and that's hard to do. It's hard to do for even the largest customers and largest M and Os. And so when you have a platform like the platform we have with SI, and you have a federation of network operators around the world like the AnyNet Federation, and you add the power of AT and and and our footprint and our security, I think you really start to get at what customers are looking for. They may have looked to buy from an MVNO and tried to piece together a solution that looks like that, but now they can buy from one of the global leaders in IoT. So, you know, we know that advanced network services like Qualia Service On Demand, network event monitoring, these things won't work when you're roaming. And so the only way to kind of create a seamless experience, whether you're on your home network or you're localized in another country, is to have this local IMSI and to have this platform that allows you to see and manage your connection regardless of whose IMSI it's using, you know, and and and that's the power of what eSIM gives. You won't be able to do quality of service on demand with roaming, but you will with eSIM and localization. Now I know you went through a formal process. I know it was very formal. We've never met so many legal departments in all our life as we met negotiating the contract. We enjoyed every minute of it, absolutely. But you actually did go through a formal process. There was a scoring system, lots of people involved. You don't make these decisions lightly. This is a pretty big deal. I mean, I remember in my Cisco days, way back in the day when you selected Jasper, again, was a big deal. But it was a formal process is the point that I'm making. So can you, at a high level, in your own words, say why AT and T selected SI for this solution? Because I love you guys, because you're the best. You and your team rock. No, there's there's like you said, a long and rigorous process behind this selection. And you know, we had a a long rubric of criteria And the reality is, is SI, you know, came out ahead by fairly large margin in aggregate. And so some of the key things are, one, you've already got some large, large, large customers and are performing well with those large customers on your platform. That helps when you think about, you know, a company the size and scale of ours with the customers we have. We can't do any science projects with our It needs to be proven. The next thing is, you know, you have a number of operators in your Edinet Federation that I think could be really complementary to what AT and T brings to the table. You know, I was introduced to Jody at TELUS, and we talked about SI, and I continue to think that she was instrumental in helping me get connected with you all. And then, you know, it really comes down to the product. The eSIM orchestration platform you have, the capabilities that you have, the experience that customers have when using the connectivity management platform, all of that, you know, really stood out when we were doing our evaluation. And I think the thing that that really pushed you ahead is the device experience that you and your team have. So a lot of people seem to have the impression that if you get a SIM with a couple of MZs on it and you pop it in a device, it's just gonna work, and it'll work everywhere. And, you know, some of these really low cost m and or MVNOs, you know, try to solve the global IoT problem that way, but it doesn't work. And the reason is is because there's a really complex dance that happens between the SIM, the network, and the device. And, you know, you have to know what what steps the device is taking. You have to know how to manage those steps, or in your case, overwrite those steps to make sure that the device stays connected. And so the device experience and your SmartConnect capabilities really help push you to the front. Yeah. Thank you for that. I can promise listeners we did not write that for you. Speaking from the heart. But I think you're also shining a light on a belief that we've had and to give credit, our founders, we're a sixteen year old company and our founders have had for sixteen years. One is it can only be done by a federation approach like the Star Alliance and the airline industry. It has to be a switch. The power, the secret source is first of all in the switch and the ability to set the switching rules to be agnostic and abstracted from the underlying operators, but agnostic and controlled in this case by AT and T, or even if it's a really, really big enterprise customers that give them the ability to set switching rules, which we implement on their behalf. And secondly, the number one thing that we see that people always underestimate is the importance of the device. And I always say, you know, why was that? And I know this podcast in particular probably get by far and away the most number of listeners just because of the nature of the content. But people who have been listening regularly will know that pretty much every podcast we've always said it's, you know, the device is hugely important and therefore how you set the firmware, how you optimise the firmware. Connect, as you say, being a device resident application, we're almost like the switching rules to do five gs. The switching rules are almost from the device out as opposed to from the operator through the platform to the device. It's the other way up. And unless you actually have deep device expertise, then you cannot do global connectivity and people still think they have the iPhone or the Samsung device in their head and they think it's what do you get a SIM in and that's connectivity. But the device is hard and I always used to joke that I blame the guys who basically the original SaaS guys and the cloud guys because they all said, well, hardware is not important anymore. You know, it's all about software because hardware is in the cloud. As a result of which people think that you take the hardware for granted because it's somewhere else. But actually in IoT, there is no such thing as a standard SKU, a standard firmware library, and therefore without the ability to have device expertise, which is very difficult to get a hold of. We bought a hardware company and we have our own firmware teams, But without that ability, you actually can't do the device optimisation, which is getting more and more critical as eighty percent of applications go to the edge. It's actually becoming more about the So I think it was Andreessen who says software is going be hardware. Well, maybe maybe he was needs to modify that in terms of IoT because we can keep all about the device. I want to double click on that a little bit. And so one of the core pillars of AT and T's IoT group platform portfolio has been our device certification program. And so we have been doing device certifications for IoT, you know, for since the beginning. It comes down to, yes, you want it fast, so do we, but you want it to work. And we're gonna make sure not only does it work, but it protects the other devices that are on our network. You know, you can have a lot of rogue consequences, signaling storms, and things like that. And so we take those extra steps to make sure that devices are gonna work well on the network. So I think in that way, our thinking, AT and Ts and SIs are very similar. And by the way, there's some research on our website. We did a survey. We think it's the largest survey in IoT. It was a particularly it was fifteen hundred enterprises, medium to large, but it was a very particular filter. It was enterprises who try not just enterprises in general, but enterprises who had attempted to implement IoT and had had some issues. So they're the people you really want to get as your your set of people that you talk to. And the point of raising that was that when we asked them, in retrospect, when you look back at your IoT project, what was the hardest single thing that you completely underestimated, the thing that actually caused your project to go into the mud? They said, I totally underestimated the importance of the device. And so the customers unfortunately find out the hard way because you might be two years into your project. And absolutely, I think it's a shared value between us as two companies is that we, in our qualification criteria, we say, look, we're going to tell you about the device. You might not like what we're going to say, but you have to go slow to go fast. And this is why. And it is an education. I think people are gradually getting it, but yeah, the device expertise is not just about the connectivity. So let's put the technology to one side and go not around AT and T and SI, but your customers. You have a few thousand IoT customers. You have a big IoT Salesforce looking after those customers. And your customers, as you said earlier, are some of the largest companies in the world. So and they are clearly exporting all over the world. So from your from your customer's point of view, I know we've been engaged and you've been engaged already talking to many customers in advance of this formal launch. What, how do you position the benefits to them of what it is that we're announcing here today? Yeah, that's a great question. And this product was really born out of requests and requirements of our customers. Those customers said, I want a single SKU, a single SIM, a single portal to manage, a single bill, a single contract. And what we're finding is, is that even some of the larger companies who and customers who have those big departments that do their telco management, they're seeing the benefits of this as well and saying, hey. There may be some efficiencies for me. It may be better performance. It may be, you know, faster deployments. It may be, operational savings and efficiencies. And so what we have here is a product that works really well for, as I mentioned, customers of of all sizes. And so whether it be a start up who's got a great product, who's starting to scale, or a huge multinational conglomerate that's already shipping devices all over and just wants to improve their processes and their economics, this product fits really well for them. And so that's why we're so excited. And we've, as I've mentioned, we've not only been talking for a while, which we have, but we've also been talking to customers. Certainly, I think we first engaged with a a customer in October twenty four and by the time this podcast goes out. So that's about about six months or so. So it's not this isn't something that we intend to do. I mean, we've been hammering out the details of this multiple trips to Atlanta and Yeah. More people than putting charts on the world with the AT and T organization charts so we could work out who we were talking to and things like that. But we've both been in the industry a while. We've seen a lot of announcements that are alliances, and then a year later it's like, whatever happened to that? But we've been engaged with customers for a little while, haven't we? And there's a lot of stuff going Absolutely. Yeah. And I've seen those announcements too, and eSIM in particular has been ripe with a number of announcements. I've got eSIM, I've got iSIM, when you start to peel things back, it's like, what do you really have? And so it was really important for us before we started doing any press or announcements was to actually get with customers and start to do deployments and experience through the eyes of the customer what that experience looks like. And so this is real, is beyond a paper PR moment. This is, you know, something that our customers are already starting to benefit from. And we expect to, you know, to take off from here. You certainly see the opportunity to create a value based platform as being the big opportunity. And there's a lot of value added services that people want that can be enabled once We see this as almost like a base platform to build a catalogue of value added services across many operators. And I know you share that vision of really wanting this to be a value based solution for your business. Yep, absolutely. So when you get the connectivity right, and it's, you know, seamless, simple, robust, resilient, you can start to do some even more innovative things. But if you're fighting to just keep a device connected when it moves from one part of a country to another, it's tough to build on top of that. And so to your point, I see this as we're getting the connectivity for all of our customers, whether you're a global SIM or global SIM advanced customer, connectivity right. And and so now we can add additional services. Know, things like integration with your major software providers to help beyond connectivity, but do some forms of device management or some forms of operational efficiencies. And so I think you can start to go beyond connectivity and really provide value with the feature service and capability that you're that you're able to provide. And that's where we're at. Yeah, exactly. And beyond cellular, because I know I've been engaged in, directly engaged in some of the early people evaluating this. You know, we sometimes in our business, we think the world is cellular, actually statistically cellular is thirteen percent of all connectivity. And there's a lot of other types of connectivity out there. There's private networks, the big companies like the mines, a lot of these, they have their own network and only when they leave mine, they go into cellular. So the switching between public private, there's satellite, which is getting there and is only going to expand in the future. There's obviously Wi Fi EV chargers that need to toggle between his wife or vending machines. If Wi Fi is available, use that. If not, choose cellular. But I want to actually choose based on signal strength and latency. So more advanced switching rules and the role of AI. The last podcast I did was on the role of AI to actually get granularity of switching rules. So the idea of all connectivity, you know, agnostic, you know, interoperability, not just between operators, but also interoperability between different connection types, rat types as they're known. There's so much more that we could bring together in this industry, which is pretty fragmented. But from a customer point of view, they just want connectivity of any type. They want the data actually. And how we get them the data is sometimes what we talk a lot about in the industry. But from the customer's point of view, they see it as, I just want the data from every device because every device is gonna be connected and it's going to be all about the data. And this is a springboard, a platform, because that's part of the architectural roadmap, a platform to go in that direction. And I know that's, again, it's a vision that you strongly share. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we're always gonna be focused on fiber and five g. That's the core of who AT and T is. But being able to offer a platform that can support all of those different connectivity technology types and make the see make the experience seamless for customers is really attractive, and another reason why we picked SI as collaborators. Mike, I'm gonna leave it there. I'm going to finish the way I started, which is to say, and this recording really borne it out, this was the podcast I was waiting for a long, long time. And I'm so glad that we got there. This is a series of pieces and parts of the announcement that's coming out today. But I think it will get a lot of people listening to it and viewing it. And I think it's gonna cause quite a bit of a buzz in the industry because I think this is an indication of the future. You mentioned Jody, the Federation or the Star Alliance model, the idea of, you know, operators collaborating together, sharing capabilities and platforms, and having switching rules that are completely agnostic between roaming and localization based on the use case is really revolutionary and disruptive and is going to provide so much more choice and capabilities for customer, which I think is going to become a huge driver to the edge with that hardware expertise that you mentioned. So thanks for the collaboration so far. I'm still reeling at your answer earlier when I asked you why you chose SI when you immediately said, because I love you guys, which made me Yeah. Oh, I said the L word. Yeah. Know. I I don't say that lightly. Y'all have been through it with us, and we appreciate you. And looking forward to sky's the limit, you know, from here on. And so looking forward to successful customer deployments together.