Some pressing questions around current age eSIM adoption & Oasis’ position in the ecosystem
Olivier Leroux, CEO of Oasis Smart SIM and Jonathan Kendall, CCO of Oasis Smart Sim answer some crowdsourced questions about current age eSIM adoption and Oasis’ position in the eSIM ecosystem
There are multiple challenges for eSIM to overcome before it can be widely adopted – what are your views on that?
Jonathan Kendall: As every technological transformation, the trust in the eSIM solution will build once there are more and more live deployments and once people can see eSIM in real-life applications. At the moment, consumers and companies are still prudent in using new-age technologies due to concerns around digital security. eSIMs can be seen as a threat to IoT mainly due to their ability to be programmed remotely (hence can arguably be hacked). However, the current age of IOT industry is mature, eSIM certifications are standardized – this makes the eSIM architecture the safest in SIM technologies in decades.
Another novel challenge is to standardize the ecosystem to achieve a truly interoperable solution. The aim is to have a technology operated and managed by any service provider adhering to standards, regulations, and guidelines. Interoperability will enable all the players to help accelerate the adoption by enforcing trust and transparency.
More specifically for OEMs, how does Oasis help them to embrace an eSIM journey?
Olivier Leroux: The main challenge experienced by OEMs is that eSIM is new territory: they discover a very new ecosystem where you have security, secure transactions, embedded software – which they have never heard of. Therefore, they need to be guided, they need to understand the different options can be implemented together into devices, what are the business cases, how they can be implemented into the devices. We engage early with our OEM and ODM customers to support not only the software integration at manufacturing stage but also the post-issuance efforts and the advisory part on their connectivity strategy. By creating such an and-to-end ecosystem, we position ourselves as a partner, not just a vendor, helping them to overcome educational and operational challenges. In order to deploy a successful strategy for connected devices and IoT, understanding the opportunities and limitations of the ecosystem is key for OEMs.
eSIM also caters to the consumer sector. Do you think the whole telecom experience will become digitalized with eSIM?
Olivier Leroux: The eSIM is not only the replacement of a physical plastic element by a digital subscription: this is part of a new customer journey that has been started by few MNOs and MVNOs in the past months – and which meets the customers’ need for a digital first experience in all services. They deserve a more modern way to activate their subscription, to onboard on the network, to engage with their telco brand. The eSIM is only an element of response to this digitalization, which brings innovative ways of building the trust of their existing customers and creating positive competition. For this reason, all eyes are on the new entrants progressively flourishing with this digital-first mentality – but we believe existing incumbent MNO’s can also benefit if they can work past their legacy systems and commercial models. Will the industry rise to meet the challenge and embrace these technologies or will new entrants simply land grab their business? Time will tell.
Oasis was recently acquired by Tata Communications – how is that new partnership changing your ambitions in the IoT space?
Jonathan Kendall: Obviously, this is a game-changer investment for Oasis from a recognized and well-established telecommunications provider with extensive experience in wholesale and in B2B and B2C communications. We have been working together for several years now: we operate all the SIM-based activities for the Intelligent Mobility Platform MOVE platform and get to build a fully managed service for the SIM Hub offered to their providers. Between us, we have advanced the technical and commercial models for eSIM to overcome the challenges mentioned earlier and allow the eSIM ROI to finally succeed. Now, the recent acquisition allows us to further build synergies that would not be available to stand-alone SIM technology companies and stand-alone communications companies. This also enables Oasis to engage in more product development, to deliver significant innovation for the eSIM and mobility sector and to create new opportunities and as our loose coupling allows both parties to engage in other commercial ecosystems: this is unique in our business environment!
What would be your advice to CSPs while they embark on their eSIM journey?
Jonathan Kendall: Companies wanting to exploit eSIM technology need to remove the difficulties we have mentioned earlier. Price and RoI is important but a single entity that can offer the e2e eSIM lifecycle is needed to demystify the difficulties of complexities. Low cost is important but a competent single prime contractor that can provide the entire stack in IoT or consumer is more important or certainly of equal importance. However, the competitive landscape offers vanilla offerings that do not lend themselves to a true operational setting. They are over-prices, lacking an understanding of how to operate these platforms and are not easy to the consumer by the CSP’s
What we’ve done to challenge the current market offer is to develop a complete IoT and Consumer offering that at one level is a managed service including outsourcing of people, process, and technology to abstract the complexity away from CSP’s, as currently deployed within the Tata Communications Group. We can offer this a la carte for those companies seeking a different ownership model for these capabilities. As outsiders-in in our thinking, we have developed our full cloud to edge solution for IoT and Consumer from the customer perspective; and our customer is the CSP.
Oasis Smart Sim is an end-to-end solution provider in the eSIM ecosystem, developing all the technologies block needed to answer the eSIM and profile management needs of CSPs, OEMs and telecommunication companies. It is recognized as one of the very few companies in the world having products, software and services certified by the GSMA both for M2M and consumer devices. The recent January 2021 transaction made by Tata Communications in form of a majority investment into Oasis has allowed the 11-year old French company to step up from eSIM management to a complete IoT stack management – allowing Oasis to create a unique solution for the IoT ecosystem.
