Canada’s Volaris Group acquires Sicap
Volaris Group Inc. is an operating unit of parent holding company Constellation Software Inc., listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TXS) and acquires, strengthens and grows vertical market technology companies enabling them to be clear leaders within their focused industry.
Volaris has bought all the shares of Sicap, including its international branch entities. Sicap will continue to operate its own brand and serve its international customers from its current offices in Europe and India. The CEO will remain Markus Doetsch and all of Sicap’s employees have been taken over.
Volaris sees Sicap as a great opportunity to expand its presence in the communications vertical, to reinforce a strong position in the mobile market globally, and to acquire competency and experience in secure and scalable mobile applications.
For Sicap, the acquisition by a global player such as Volaris will mean a creation of growth opportunities in innovation areas such as Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things, as well as an easier access to investment capital. Sicap will strengthen its position as a global provider of telecommunications solutions to mobile network operators and mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs).
Markus Doetsch, CEO Sicap agrees: “With Volaris, we have found a partner that not only has a deep understanding of our industry, but also shows a continuous track record in constantly growing companies they had acquired through best practice sharing and targeted investments into their growth areas”. He concludes, “In this way, we will continue the success story of Sicap, which began as a subsidiary of Swisscom, with Volaris as the new owner.”
In future, Sicap be part of the Volaris Communications Vertical business portfolio, which includes leading technology brands such as Incognito Software, Netadmin Systems, Active Broadband OSS, Tarantula Global Holdings, Telepin Software and WDS Mobile.
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Mirai ‘Okiru’ botnet targets billions of ARC-based IoT devices
By dalew
Researchers suggest the variant could ‘change the landscape of Linux IoT infection’
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Enterprises look to monitor, manage and optimise the IoT ecosystem
Nitesh Arora, the head of marketing at Cloudleaf, reveals the benefits of the divide and conquer approach to digitally transforming complex enterprise operations
Global adoption of industrial IoT hardware, connectivity and services is soaring. In fact, over the next few years, investment in IoT technologies will experience a whopping 15.6% CAGR worldwide, reaching projected spending of US$1.29tn by 2020. Nowhere is this more true than in the manufacturing sector, where the IoT is helping enterprises to digitally transform their legacy plant operations. The potential benefits are compelling, including near-zero downtime operations, sixsigma certified product quality, and streamlined asset maintenance. To put things in perspective, manufacturing related IoT spending alone, accounted for US$178bn in 2016 – more than spending in transportation and utilities, combined.
It’s understandable, therefore, that the manufacturing sector is keen to embrace IoT in order to take advantage of obvious benefits. These include addressing the challenges of total cost of ownership (TCO), competition, complexity and risk, but increasingly, early-movers are also using it as a vehicle for generating growth and as a hedge against increasing global competitive pressures. According to Vernon Turner, an IoT research fellow and senior vice president at IDC: “investments by China and the United States in IoT solutions is driving these two countries to account for double-digit annual growth rates and over half of the IoT spending.”
On paper, this all seems perfectly reasonable and straightforward, but in practice, manufacturers are finding that adoption is a relative and loaded concept. Implementing IoT across the enterprise ecosystem in one fell swoop is a tricky business and better left to larger, well diversified outfits able to absorb front-loaded costs and risks. Instead the trend is in smaller compartmentalised industrial IoT (IIoT) implementations that solve a narrow set of business challenges, rather than trying to boil all oceans at once. By adopting a disciplined implement, measure, optimise and replicate approach, manufacturers are able to take short manageable sprints towards solving industrial process automation challenges in a scalable and purposeful way.
The promise of IoT to provide powerful cross-boundary visibility, real-time monitoring and granular control across the entire manufacturing value-chain of people, assets and workflows, is generally well understood. But the real challenges are the next step: How do manufacturers choose an IoT provider? How do they execute? And how do they measure success, scale growth and replicate their gains? Cloudleaf was founded to specifically answer these questions and provide solutions that elegantly solve real-world business problems in manufacturing and distribution, pharma and life sciences, and other process automation industries. Our solutions are designed to simplify the manufacturing processes and solve emerging asset and workflow challenges in a measurable, value-added and sustainable way.
Increasingly, we are finding that manufacturers are investing in IoT technologies that bolster their manufacturing operations management (MOM), enterprise asset management (EAM) and predictive maintenance (PdM) capabilities. In fact the push right now is to get a better understanding of all the assets, processes and skilled labour in play on the plant-floor and at the operational level of the enterprise. […]
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Saving cities US$5 trillion with smart, sharing technologies
The rate of global urbanisation is growing exponentially. But while living in cities offers both social and economic opportunities, the rising costs of living are threatening to increase social inequality, slow down economic growth, and increase levels of crime.
Smart cities, and the technologies that underpin them, are hailed as a significant solution to this problem, and are set to reduce costs for governments, citizens and enterprises alike. In fact, a recent report published by ABI Research, in partnership with Chordant and CA Technologies, reveals smart city and IoT technologies have the potential to save governments, enterprises and citizens globally over $5 trillion (€4.09 trillion) by 2022, says Jim Nolan, executive vice president, Chordant at InterDigital.
Specifically, it is new sharing and service economy paradigms, and the “Internet of Things” along with artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, that will play a leading role in driving these cost savings.
Cutting costs for governments
Governments can benefit tremendously from the implementation of IoT technology and sharing economy business models in energy, water utilities, transportation, and crime and vandalism.
Energy savings is perhaps the first, and most obvious cost benefit of IoT and smart city technology. Turning street lights into smart, connected systems with intelligent on/off cycles, for example, could yield a 30% cost saving for governments.
When it comes to water utilities, advanced leak detection systems can drive direct cost savings by removing the need for manual inspection, while opportunity cost savings can be made through water waste management and waste prevention systems. These cost savings, in turn, help to reduce end-user prices.
Transportation is a major cost centre in government budgets, but adding smart technology such as electronic toll collection (ETC) vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) technology, as well as intelligent traffic light systems, can optimise the use of existing road capacity.
In regard to government services such as waste collection, mobile resource management (MRM) technology can dispatch, manage and monitor field workers, while the deployment of smart garbage bins can enable real-time, remote fill-level monitoring, and therefore the timely dispatch of garbage collection trucks. This isn’t a fantasy, they’re already in use in Dubai. This enables waste collection fleets to run more efficiently and results in fewer trucks on the road. In fact, this form of smart waste collection has the potential to reach cost savings of 30%.
Finally, AI-based automation for surveillance cameras, along with data optimisation, can reduce the costs associated with monitoring and analysing video footage in support of crime reduction. AI technology can also be used to complement surveillance cameras with crowd sourced intelligence such as data captured from social sites, as well as smartphone footage from citizens.
By taking advantage of these different technologies, city governments in mega cities (a metropolitan area with a total population in excess of ten million people) globally could save up $58 billion (€47.40 billion) annually.
Affordable services for citizens
Smart city technologies are not only key for driving cost savings for governments – they play just as important a role in reducing costs for citizens. After housing, mobility presents the second largest item in family […]
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Digi International announces the availability of the newly enhanced Digi TransPort® family of routers
Digi International®, a global provider of Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity products and services, announced the availability of the newly enhanced Digi TransPort® family of routers. Equipped with advanced RF modules, users can easily migrate their IoT solutions from legacy 2G and 3G networks to high-speed 4G networks with routers specifically built for the precise demands of vertically-focused IoT applications.
Retail, industrial and transportation markets require robust IoT applications where pervasive connectivity is a must. With its newly enhanced TransPort routers, Digi has combined flexibility with versatile connectivity to satisfy a wide range of industry-based needs from retail to industrial process automation to smart city and high-speed transit Wi-Fi.
Expanded range of performance and price options
The latest Digi TransPort routers are actually part of a single IoT platform that includes six updated products featuring different performance options for distinct IoT solutions implemented in specific markets. Design engineers and system architects will be able to choose the product with the exact performance characteristics they desire at a price point that enhances the overall value proposition while avoiding the costs of unnecessary built-in features.
Specifically for the retail vertical, the Digi TransPort WR11 XT provides secure, extremely resilient connections for digital signage, kiosks and automated teller machines (ATMs). It offers global cellular carrier certifications, license-free enterprise software, PCI security features, small form factor, and advanced network management and patented Digi SureLink™ technology, which maintains persistent wireless connections via proactive link integrity functions. Additionally, Digi TransPort routers offer dual SIM slots, providing built-in carrier redundancy with the ability to seamlessly switch between mobile network providers, as desired.
Advanced management capabilities
As part of the Digi IoT Connectivity Platform, Digi TransPort routers can be accessed and easily managed through Digi Remote Manager®, an innovative user interface to monitor, diagnose and fix routers (including third-party devices), and upload firmware remotely without a costly service truck roll.
Digi Remote Manager presents an online performance dashboard for configuring and troubleshooting devices across multiple locations—with alarms and reports to keep users updated. It is also PCI-certified, meaning that connections remain in compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS).
Security is further supported via the Digi TrustFence® device security framework that addresses common transactional security and access control vulnerabilities of remote devices, from authenticated boot and secure device access to user validation and data encryption.
“With Digi’s latest TransPort routers, we will be able to offer a targeted range of performance options for market-specific applications to build a wireless backbone of reliable connectivity at a more attractive and affordable cost,” said Scott Nelson, vice president of product of Digi International.
“That means that customers will have relentless reliability and connectivity with the right router for the right job at the right price without sacrificing security or ease-of-manageability for those vertical markets demanding the latest in IoT solution capabilities.”
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