Watch out for Wyless: An interview with Wyless CEO Dan McDuffie by Mike Carrozzo, Chief Editor, Connected World
Watch out for Wyless. The company has big plans for redefining what MVNO means in the world of data, and has already carved out a path along those lines.
I had a chance to sit down with Dan McDuffie recently, the man appointed CEO this past March at Wyless, to talk about the new direction the company has taken in the past few months. I must say, the vision he has certainly sounds like it could up the ante for others in the market that are following the traditional model.
He sees the MVNO business evolving much more towards what he would say is like the managed services space. His company will still resell you the data in the traditional MVNO model, but that’s not where the big picture is for his company. Instead, customers are coming to Wyless these days and asking them to run their network.
Wyless is essentially doing everything from software, to professional services, to actually physically managing the data network into the customer’s NOC. Eventually McDuffie sees Wyless hosting the customer’s application in its own NOC—but that’s a bit further down the road.
So how is this different from how say, a Jasper Wireless works with a carrier, you may ask? In the case of Jasper they are doing it for the cellular carrier—AT&T for example (or RACO Wireless for T-Mobile, so as not to single any one company out). Wyless, instead, is going after the big enterprise customer directly, and according to McDuffie already has a significant chunk of business in this regard.
As he described it to me, Wyless is transforming into more of an on-boarding partner for big enterprise customers that want to work with multiple operators. And that’s the key. Wyless is working with nine mobile operators globally at this point, a number that at this time next year McDuffie believes will be much larger. And as we start to talk about global M2M deployments and the management at the enterprise level, I think that will be the key differentiator for Wyless.
When you think about it, the infrastructure, including the management platform, activation gateways, the billing system, and network layer, becomes the product for the enterprise customer, not just the data.
Given the fact more carriers are moving directly into M2M, McDuffie considers such a “morphing” of services, as he calls it, necessary for MVNOs today. The market is a-changing, as they say. And it’s the players that evolve which stay in the game.
For more information on Connected World http://www.connectedworldmag.com/blog/?p=515
