With KORE's Super SIM, Mason quickly delivers a new global product category of IoT services – Mobile Infrastructure-as-a-Service
In today’s mobile-first world, smartphones, tablets, and wearables are becoming a common form factor for IoT use cases, like inventory management, field service management, and logistics. Companies are turning to these single-purpose devices to create innovative smart solutions that give them a competitive advantage and extend their brand.
It’s no surprise that the mobile device management (MDM) market is predicted to grow to $15.7 billion by 2025. While there’s a huge opportunity to capitalize on this dedicated device space, often IoT product owners aren’t sure where to start evaluating hardware options and struggle to get their solution to market.
That’s where Mason saw a huge opportunity. Why not bring the speed and control of software development to the hardware world with Mobile Infrastructure-as-a-Service? With Mason, software developers can quickly create and deploy application-specific, white-labeled Android devices using Mason’s portfolio of connected devices – like templates to build apps on top of.
Using Mason’s software tools, developers can completely customize the operating system, create unique user device experiences, deploy updates, and remotely manage thousands of devices in the field.
Mason even takes it one step further for their customers with logistics-as-a-service to replace the need for supply chain management, warehousing, or fulfillment to the end customer.
“With Super SIM’s global connectivity, we expanded to 57 countries in the first month of operation. ”
JIM XIAO | Chief Executive Officer, Mason
With the audacious goal of creating a completely new category, the expectations were high for Mason. Their service needed to cover every aspect of Mobile Infrastructure-as-a-Service, including devices, development tools, SDKs to program the hardware, a cloud-platform to manage the fleet of hundreds or thousands of devices anywhere in the world, and an affordable, reliable cellular connectivity solution.
Delivering that type of scale from day one was a huge challenge, especially for cellular service. They needed to rapidly ship devices, but the manual process of updating SIM cards was time consuming. Likewise, working with multiple mobile carriers around the world, trying to optimize the data plans, and ordering new SIMs added up to a logistics nightmare – quite the opposite of the simplicity they were trying to achieve.
Super SIM comes with instant access to 400+ mobile networks across the world. This allowed Mason to create a turn-key solution that enables developers anywhere to build a proof-of-concept in under 48 hours. From there, developers can scale from one device to thousands deployed anywhere in the world. Since Mason vertically integrates the hardware, software, and logistics service, devices ship out to individuals automatically provisioned with the exact apps, configurations and cellular connectivity services.
While their customers now range across retail, hospitality, and field services, one of Mason’s first customers was a clinical trial firm that sought to rapidly digitize and expand their trials globally. “Since Super SIM works seamlessly all over the world, every unit gets connectivity by default,” said Jim Xiao, CEO. “That enabled us to expand to more than 57 countries in the first month of operation for this critical client.”
To provide that entire stack as a service, Mason had to remove all layers of complexity, including supply chain delays. While they needed to deliver a global service, they didn’t want the burden of managing multiple SIM providers – and the resulting product SKUs across the globe. They needed to have one SIM to simplify their development, testing, and logistics.
“Streamlining our business with one SIM and one SKU dramatically simplified our manufacturing/logistics process and also reduced our costs,” added Xiao. “With KORE's Amazon-style ordering and shipping, we can simply order SIMs online and ship them directly to our device manufacturers.”
With Super SIM, Mason was able to roll out globally and deliver the same device experience regardless of location.
Prior to using Super SIM, Mason had to change and modify their solution to adapt to the varying requirements and behaviors of each mobile network. Conversely, Mason can now provide a single global platform that delivers consistent workflows, features, and behaviors for devices deployed across 400+ networks.
“Now customers never have to worry if their devices will work in another country or experience different behavior when on the home network versus roaming,” added Xiao. ”With Super SIM and its APIs, we’ve removed the orchestration and coordination that needs to happen to deploy connected devices globally and deliver the same user experience.”
The combination of KORE’s drop shipping, simple procurement, and APIs for SIM management enabled Mason to quickly create a new logistics offering for their customers, giving customers visibility and control over their connectivity and functionality logistics of devices.
“We’re managing thousands of KORE-connected devices worldwide with Super SIM APIs,” noted Xiao. “With our new logistics service, they can dig into those devices, check or change the internet services, and even see how much data specific applications are using.” Armed with that knowledge, Mason customers can set alerts and thresholds to manage their application and the service for their ideal customer experience.
Plus, the APIs enable remote debugging of devices, which is particularly valuable for mission-critical solutions. “For use cases like clinical drug trials, our customers cannot afford for devices to become non-responsive or go down,” said Xiao. “With the SIM management APIs, we can debug any issues quickly to deliver stronger reliability and uptime to our customers.”
“Streamlining our global business with one SIM and one SKU dramatically simplified our manufacturing/logistics process and reduced costs. ”
JIM XIAO | Chief Executive Officer. Mason