In an ever-changing global market dominated by artificial intelligence, data, and connectivity technologies, IoT solutions are critical for businesses to couple device management and monitor how things are changing, to have better insights into business performances. A lot goes into productizing for businesses that attempt to navigate their way through IoT deployments. Maintaining an uninterrupted connection to IoT devices also becomes a major concern.
Understanding the gap, Simetric simplifies the IoT Ecosystem by aggregating IoT connectivity and edge device data in a single pane of glass SaaS Platform. Headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, the company provides unified workflow, managerial insights, and intuitive controls for IoT management, through the Simetric platform. Allen Boone, CEO & Co-founder of Simetric was with the CEOViews team to share detailed insights about the company.
CEOViews: Simetric is the next-generation insights and management SaaS platform for the IoT and Edge ecosystem in a single pane. Flexible, dynamic, and scalable. Kindly take us through the inception of the firm.
Allen Boone: We recognized an underlying need in the IoT industry in 2017. Identifying the lack of fundamental support and expertise in IoT cellular connectivity management, we created a new platform that encompassed a unified management pane for companies of any size, type, or geography to centrally manage all IoT connectivity devices. By 2018, the company started developing and looked broader at what the next phase of what IoT could become. This was to unify connectivity and device performance to enable companies to not only unify non-conforming IoT platforms but also move IoT business process execution to the device effortlessly across all the operator’s IoT platforms.
Simetric is set out to bring more intelligent edge device control to enterprises, by bringing a unified software solution down onto the legacy networking space.
From its inception, the mission was to help customers address and manage and simplify the expense, difficulties, compounded complexity and growth of new IoT and Edge devices along with their legacy developments that were a result of having multiple carrier platforms. Now it is unified IoT and Edge device control, that solves for the fragmentation and creates a standard way of operating in a single pane of glass.
CEOViews: What are the trends in technology that are significant in the current marketplace you are in? How Simetric is shaping transformation in the IoT industry?
Allen Boone: Simetric is set out to bring more intelligent edge device control to enterprises, by bringing a unified software solution down onto the legacy networking space. To achieve that, we had to first awaken the industry on how antiquated our methods were for operating their business. Currently, businesses are using ~5-6 billion of these devices.
Before Simetric there was no unified control but only proprietary approaches from every device OEM and CSPs. The operating expense waste was substantial along with the lack of being able to optimize business processes. When Simetric fully launched its sales and marketing demand generation in 2020, it quickly garnered the attention of enterprises, MNOs and MVNOs of every size and type. A solution built entirely on Azure is now bringing hundreds of millions of operational IoT devices, that did not have an opportunity to benefit from Microsoft under a unified solution, until Simetric.
CEOViews: What type of products and services does your company provide?
Allen Boone: Simetric is an industry-first, single pane of glass IoT lifestyle SaaS platform enabling the discovery and management of all cellular IoT and edge devices, split across cellular and satellite networks in one unified pane with device workflow.
CEOViews: How do you manage to provide different and varied Microsoft solutions?
Allen Boone: The Simetric leadership team largely comes from a software background, including Cisco and Microsoft. Simetric believed, from the onset, there was a need for every enterprise to find uniformity in managing the abundance and diversity of their IoT devices and that could only be achieved via a software solution being brought to legacy networking. From its inception, Simetric built most of its IoT platform on Azure and its tools. That decision has been rewarded in working with Microsoft across security audits, analytical tools all the way to incorporating Azure IoT Hub into Simetric for customers worldwide.
CEOViews: How does your firm tests and measures innovation that help in the process of company growth?
Allen Boone: Simetric’s innovation is closely aligned to direct customer input surrounded by their legacy impediments which holds true for our CSP, MVNO and enterprise customers alike. The input Simetric is uniquely able to garner from our users, allows normalization of all these discrepancies on the side of CSP systems and then apply it to customer empowered workflow within the Simetric platform. Our new innovations are easily measured in adoption. Like most software companies we offer tiered licenses. Nearly 95% of our customers use our most comprehensive license features to control their IoT and edge devices.
Simetric further enhances technical innovation by establishing a release gate for all new features that are driven through our operations organization. Operations infuses a breadth of customer input into workflow and analytical outcomes and technology enhancements.
CEOViews: What are the factors that differentiate Simetric from others in the marketplace?
Allen Boone: Simetric has worked both in technology development and thought leadership, to be a trailblazer normalizing the discrepancies between the CSPs and all IoT platforms to enable a unified workflow for IoT and edge devices. It is an Azure solution that affords legacy approaches to be just that, legacy.
When Simetric chose Microsoft Azure, it was both a strategic and technical decision. Microsoft is unquestionably a partnering company with a long history of investing in sustained partner success. As a Certified Microsoft Azure Partner, tools and updates are very accessible to support innovation. Beyond being a certified partner, Simetric has benefited in collaborating with Microsoft via the 5G Open Innovation Lab in Bellevue Washington where both companies are actively involved.
CEOViews: What type of working culture do you maintain in your firm? What does it take to build a great team?
Allen Boone: At the core of our culture is a commitment to accountability, trust, and integrity. Every person in our company has worked with at least one other person at another company. We work with a purpose-built commitment to drive value with every customer and to one another. Our culture is one that any company of any size would covet. Also, Simetric’s leadership comes with diversified, global leadership, and experiences from companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and other industry-leading organizations. We are not your typical ‘early stage’ company, given that our C-level team has over 120 years of combined experience.
CEOViews: What challenges did your firm come across throughout its journey so far?
Allen Boone: The single largest hurdle Simetric confronted was awakening the market to the legacy IoT device fragmentation. The adaptiveness and the abundance of Microsoft Azure tools afforded Simetric to rapidly develop one of the most valuable platforms, measured in customer ROI, in rapid order. Having the platform and the trust of Microsoft technologies bolstered Simetric’s abilities to win early opportunities.
CEOViews: What type of future vision do you have for your company?
Allen Boone: Similar to what has been written about Micro- soft’s success under Satya Nadella, Simetric is in a constant state of perpetual innovation. The expansiveness of Simet- ric’s platform has enabled, with customers, to address the fractured nature of the IoT and Edge landscape. The needs of clients grew Simetric’s platform integration into over 225 connectivity service providers (CSPs) around the world.
Simetric has unified visibility across CSPs and satellite networks to offer full device control. The IoT market is evolving rapidly. With an ~5-6B IoT devices in the market and CAGR growing to an ~29B devices by 2030, Simetric’s growth will be both direct and via the partnerships it has established. Simetric is already growing 4x YoY as companies realize the immediate time to value along with unrivalled 8-10x yearly ROI for every dollar invested. The platform is powerfully built allowing Simetric to utilize their API architecture as an APIaaS to enrich our partner’s platforms to drive more value and services to their customers and their businesses deeper to the edge. Simetric will see growth via this approach with partners like Tata Communications, ServiceNow, Cradlepoint AT&T among other numerous CSPs. Each of these efforts will push transformative work into the global System Integrators. As Satya Nadella has stated, digital transformation is just beginning. Simetric sees it beginning at the edge and will be at the forefront of technology and thought leadership.
CEOViews: What are the most important habits that should be followed by peers in your industry to run their firms more efficiently and creatively leading to fast growth and success?
Allen Boone: The Edge is arguably the most fragmented technical landscape, yet the Edge is poised to be the next major phase of cloud migration of work. Successful Edge management will require knowing and controlling the full expanse of the devices an enterprise has deployed, regardless of what network they operate on.
