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Saicom offers network-agnostic mobile data analytics

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 15 Feb 2019
Saicom CTO Greg de Chasteauneuf.
Saicom CTO Greg de Chasteauneuf.

Telecoms service provider Saicom has developed a network-agnostic mobile data analytics platform to help businesses analyse and manage their mobile data usage more efficiently.

Saicom's locally-developed access point name (APN) platform, Saicom.Connect, aims at allowing better insights into data usage and ultimately creating cost savings for organisations.

According to Saicom CTO Greg de Chasteauneuf, 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. 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."

He says customers can purchase a block of data, of whatever size they want, and Saicom provides a service that is not linked to any specific cellular provider.

"We can either link the data block to existing SIM cards or issue new ones for the chosen provider. This means 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."

Saicom also found a significant shortcoming in the disconnect of most device provisioning systems from the APN, which it believes is compounded when dealing with thousands of machine-to-machine (M2M) devices.

According to De Chasteauneuf, Saicom has baked over the air provisioning into the Saicom.Connect platform, which allows administrators to control and manage their Internet of things devices directly from a single pane of glass.

Customers then connect to their networks via private or public APN, as required. Once linked via the APN to the Saicom.Connect platform, the organisation can then monitor and allocate its 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.

"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. You could then either throttle the usage of those apps or block them entirely," says De Chasteauneuf.

For HR, it is also easy to block an employee who has left the company from using the data pool, with a single click.

There is also the ability to pair a SIM card to a specific physical device. De Chasteauneuf gives an example where a router uses a SIM card for connectivity, but an employee removes 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.

He says data packages start at 5GB per month and can scale up to infinity.

Saicom Holdings previously partly owned cellphone bill optimisation company, Tariffic, which shut its doors in April last year.

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