How NFV Is Linking People and Machines
Moving to give IT organizations more control over all the things they might want to connect to the Internet, Sprint this week released an upgrade to the management platform it uses to manage machine-to-machine (M2M) communications.
Mohamad Nasser, senior director of product, platforms and marketing for the Emerging Solutions organization at Sprint, says version 2.0 of Command Center from Sprint marks the first time that Sprint is exposing the software it uses to manage M2M connections to enterprise IT organizations via a self-service portal. Rather than requiring IT organizations to build out their own management platform to address emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications, Nasser says IT organizations can more easily leverage 2G, 3G and 4G cellular network investments Sprint has already deployed in over 200 countries.
Sprint, says Nasser, provides a wide array of tools to manage thousands of devices connected to the Sprint network based on time of day, geography, usage patterns and, of course, the amount of data flowing across the network. In addition, Nasser says that Sprint is exposing application programming interfaces (APIs) that turn the Sprint M2M platform into a programmable network.
Nasser says Command Center 2.0 also gives customers more flexible pooling of network traffic options and customizable billing triggers that prevent network bandwidth consumption and cellular telephone costs from spiraling out of control.
While IoT clearly represents a new frontier for deriving business value from IT, the truth is that most IT organizations don’t have a whole lot of experience when it comes to managing the technology. Given the number of devices that can be attached to the network, the cost of winning that experience could prove to be considerable.
For those reasons, IT organizations moving into the realm of IoT might be well advised to adopt frameworks that have already proven themselves to work before reinventing the M2M wheel from the ground up.
